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CREOLIZING POLITICAL THEORY
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j u s t i d e a s
transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought
series editors
Drucilla Cornell
Roger Berkowitz
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CREOLIZING POLITICAL THEORY
READING ROUSSEAU THROUGH FANON
Jane Anna Gordon
fordham university press
new york 2014
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Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some
content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gordon, Jane Anna, 1976–
Creolizing political theory : reading Rousseau through Fanon / Jane Anna Gordon. —
First edition.
pages cm. — (Just ideas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8232-5481-1 (hardback) — isbn 978-0-8232-5482-8 (paper)
1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778—Political and social views. 2. Fanon,
Frantz, 1925–1961—Political and social views. 3. General will. 4. Legitimacy of
governments. 5. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.
jc179.r9g67 2014
320.01—dc23
2013019537
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
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In loving memory of Yvonne Patricia Solomon Garel (or Grandma Pat), Jack Garel,
Th elma Young, David Levy, Don Belton, Gary Tobin, and William R. Jones
and
to kerido Lewis, in whom so many worlds converge and are made new
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 18
2 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 63
3 Rousseau’s General Will 95
4 Fanonian National Consciousness 129
5 Th inking Th rough Creolization 162
Conclusion 203
Notes 221
References 265
Index 287
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xi
Acknowledgments
I had the unique good fortune of undergoing two periods of concentrated
intellectual apprenticeship. In a fundamental way, this book is my eff ort
to synthesize them in ways that pay due service to the greatest strengths
of both, creatively making them speak to each other where they otherwise
might not with losses that would be both scholarly and political.
Th e fi rst of these periods of education involved my graduate studies at the
University of Pennsylvania during a moment of its transition. I was drawn
to the institution by Nancy Hirschmann, Ellen Kennedy, Andrew Norris,
Anne Norton, Rogers Smith, and Bob Vitalis. I deliberately sought and
found through their mentorship a thoroughly unconventional training in
political theory for which each year makes me more grateful. From Ellen, I
particularly appreciated her conveying of the gravitas that informs German
social theory. Th is seemed to demand a refl exive repugnance toward much
of the overly sanguine and self-congratulatory work that goes on within the
discipline of political science. From Anne, there was fi rst the challenge and
inspiration as a political theorist to aim also to be a writer and second to
refuse the parochialism that would suggest that one could undertake an ad-
equate study of politics while ignoring urgent and exciting developments in
other fi elds. Countless conversations with Bob about unlikely connections
stimulated some of the more creative ideas that I have had and a better sense
of both the pleasures and frustrations of maintaining commitments that
are considered marginal to the academic domain in which one primarily
resides. Rogers off ered a remarkable model of what is required of committed
graduate teaching and of what can and cannot be achieved by tirelessly in-
volving oneself in a critical way in hegemonic debates about race and racism
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xii Acknowledgments
in US life. My education at Penn was also enriched immeasurably by the
life- affi rming, funny, and insightful Kahlil Williams, Amel Ahmed, Cheng
Chen, Lia Howard, and Justin Wert.
Th e founding and early meetings of the Caribbean Philosophical As-
sociation were for me, and many others, a second, simultaneous training.
Th ose who undertook the magnifi cent tasks under the not-so-humble
motto of “shifting the geography of reason,” fi rst George Belle, B. Anthony
Bogues, Patrick Goodin, Lewis Gordon, Clevis Headley, Paget Henry, Nel-
son Maldonado-Torres, Charles Mills, and Supriya Nair, soon joined by
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Marina Banchetti-Robino, Brinda Mehta, Michael
Monahan, and Kristin Waters are exemplary in their combination of intel-
lectual vision and collegiality. Th ey have cultivated a movement of thought
that breaks with so much of the inevitable decadence of thinking within the
world’s reigning power. Th eir eff orts have oriented the substance and form
of all of my writing. Among them, requiring separate mention, is Paget, not
only for his friendship and ongoing conversation from which I always learn
but also for the opportunity to guest-edit with Neil Roberts the issue of the
C. L. R. James Journal through which so many ideas explored here developed
their greater precision.
My colleagues at Temple University heard the core ideas of this book
four years ago—in Joe Schwartz and Heath Fogg Davis’s case, twice. I am
grateful to have had the chance to work together with faculty specializing
in political theory in the Department of Political Science to build a vibrant
and growing graduate student community that included the talented, en-
gaging, and integrity-fi lled Matthew Smetona, Greg Graham, John Hykel,
Jim Delise, Ashish Vaidya, Danielle Scherer, Nick Catsis, Erin Meagher,
Justin Murphy, Brett Miller, Alex Melonas, Francis Boyle, Arnold Kim, Na-
than Schrader, and Desiree Craig. I had formally presented these ideas for
the fi rst time on Temple’s campus at the Center for Humanities at Temple
(CHAT). Th e initial feedback that I received from Hilary Dick and Miriam
Solomon was very useful. I was subsequently fortunate to be a year-long fel-
low at the CHAT where challenges concerning how I should and should not
employ the concept of creolization were genuinely fruitful. For their central
participation in these discussions, I would like to thank Liz Varon, Hilary
Dick, Talissa Ford, Oliver Gaycken, Jeremy Schipper, Matthew Johnson,
Byron Lee, Lior Levy, Holger Lowendorf, Nyama McCarthy-Brown, Nicole
Noll, Chiaoning Su, Amy Woodworth, Andrew Diemer, and Janet Neigh.
Requiring separate mention is Peter Logan, who is ultimately responsible
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Acknowledgments xiii
for everything that takes place in that very special domain that he has culti-
vated on the top fl oor of Gladfelter Hall. For the tireless spirit with which
he undertakes this organizational work from which so many of us benefi ted
and for his terrifi c friendship, I thank him. Beyond the Department of Po-
litical Science and CHAT, the people who helped make Temple an intel-
lectual home were Rebecca Alpert, Laura Levitt, David Watt, Ruth Ost,
Paul Taylor, Terry Rey, and the members of the Committee on the Status of
Women (CSW), especially Joyce Lindorff , Abbe Forman, Melissa Gilbert,
and Nilgun Anadolu-Okur. Not part of the faculty at Temple but also resid-
ing in Philadelphia is Ros Dutton, whose insights and support have been
the source of multidimensional growth indispensable to the completion of
this work.
Since composing the initial manuscript that became this book, I pre-
sented the creolization pieces of it on two major occasions, fi rst at the
American Political Science Association conference in Washington, DC, in
2010 and then at the Western Political Science Association meeting in San
Antonio, Texas, in 2011. I particularly appreciated the comments and ques-
tions posed at the fi rst presentation by Laura Grattan and the conversation
on and beyond the two-part panel at the second with Keisha Lindsay, Bar-
nor Hess, Ed Barvosa, Michaelle Browers, Cricket Keating, Farah Godrej,
and Rita Dhamoon. Bonnie Honig also read and commented thoroughly
on these pieces with just the combination of enthusiasm and criticism that
stimulated refl ection that improved them.
Once there was a complete manuscript that had benefi ted considerably
from the suggestions of two very helpful reviewers for Fordham, Rogers
Smith, Jason Neidleman, and John Comaroff read the entire text, off ering
the insightful challenges and responses that are so characteristic of them.
Perhaps one of the clearest marks of age is the increasing simultaneity of
moments of triumph with those of grave loss. Th e experience of the latter
is intensifi ed when it involves the very people who enabled and would have
found the former delicious. Th is is particularly true of the much loved and
missed Yvonne Patricia Solomon Garel, my beloved late mother-in-law. I
began the refl ections that led to this book in the shadow of her sudden and
untimely death. Although she did not do intellectual work of this kind, I
tried in my own very limited way to emulate the spirit in which she under-
took everything else that she did do. I began graduate school with two very
young children, one seven weeks old, and a thoroughly involved husband
who was also a department chair and active scholar. Grandma Pat assured
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xiv Acknowledgments
that I never felt the tension between work and mothering that remains an
at-times impossible juggling act for most employed women. As her son, my
husband, frequently says, when it came to what really mattered, she didn’t
ask whether something was possible, only how to make it happen. It is
precisely because one knows how lucky one is to have any time with such a
person that their departure hurts so indelibly. For her husband, Jack Garel,
my late father-in-law, to carry on in its wake was not possible. His delight
in watching his children and grandchildren enjoy themselves and in mun-
danely fi xing his own home and that of others is a precious memory.
I was very thankful to have read Edwidge Danticat’s stunning Brother, I’m
Dying, which opens with the death of her remarkable uncle and her own fi rst
pregnancy before I, in the same phone call, received the news of the death
of my mom’s beloved cousin, David Levy, and the arrival of my brother’s
fi rst child, my fabulous niece, Mila Bea Comaroff Wang Mi. Th e son of my
grandfather’s sister, David, bridged countries and generations, embodying
in often-dreary Manchester, England, the humor and humanistic sensibili-
ties of South African Jewish life that are worth carrying on. Although we try
to sustain these deliberately through certain rituals and through nurturing
relations between generations, it is striking how what we seek is often cap-
tured best in the smallest of gestures, and even then, in the minutiae of how
they are done. Also among those missed is Don Belton—colleague, writer,
magnifi cent storyteller, and kindred spirit—whose murder was the outcome
of displaced anger unleashed out of confusion, fear, and self-loathing. When
standing at Temple’s food trucks waiting for lunch, I often would wonder
what astute and hilarious comment he might have made. One of the many
reasons I miss him is that I don’t know what it would have been. Th ere are
also Gary Tobin, whose unique combination of brilliance, courage, humor,
and impatience was and remains a genuine inspiration, and William R.
Jones, who, in addition to his own momentous contributions to promoting
the work of black intellectuals and developing black existential liberation-
ist thought, offi ciated at my husband and my wedding, talking in the most
moving of terms about the revolutionary power of committed love. Finally,
there are two recent losses from the vibrant Hyde Park community that
was my childhood home: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whom I did not know
personally but respected greatly and whose many insights punctuate the
text that follows and Gabe Mitchell, who I remember as my brother’s curly-
haired, mischievous friend, who felt the world that swirled around him with
a profundity that then and now makes me short of breath.
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Acknowledgments xv
Profound thanks are also due to Drucilla Cornell, Ken Panfi lio, and
Roger Berkowitz for inaugurating such an important and exciting book se-
ries that I am very proud to join.
Last, to my transnational, diasporic family, who exemplifi es the best of
creolization as vividly as anything else: to Sylvia Crosdale, Jean and John
Comaroff , Leonard Gordon, Robert and Marc Evans, Josh Comaroff , Shing
Ong, Mila Bea, Leo, Mathieu, Jenni, Sula, and Elijah Gordon. And to my
ever and always beloved, Lewis, with whom the past fi fteen years together
seem like an immensely pleasurable blink of an eye.
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1
Introduction
. . . with what eyes?
—sappho
. . . yet more inclusive than “and.”
—paula wilson
Th is book off ers a reading of two central themes in the work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau through insights from the writings of Frantz Fanon. Th rough this
eff ort, I hope to enrich discussions of the nature of methodology and re-
quirements of democratic legitimacy and provide an example of the cre-
olizing of political theory. In this case, it is a creolization of one canonical
fi gure through the ideas of another as well as of central concepts in Western
political thought. Why undergo such an undertaking?
Rousseau’s unsettling challenges concerning the emancipatory potential
of human inquiry and his infamous conception of the general will can be
more fruitfully understood and further enlivened through drawing upon
resources from the creolized thought of Fanon and, by extension, political
refl ection from the Global South. In particular, when using the typically
abstract idea of the general will to explore how political theory can be put in
the service of forging more legitimate democratic possibilities in diverse and
unequal, colonized societies, one can envision creolization as the general-
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2 Introduction
izing of political will or as the achievement of generality. Put slightly diff er-
ently, creolization as articulated here might be understood as the operation-
alizing of the general will. If I am correct, this eff ort has broad implications
for political theory. Among them is the advancement of political theory as a
form of creolized thought, or one in which disparate disciplinary and meth-
odological resources are brought together to create unique amalgams better
attuned to addressing salient political problems and debates thrown open by
the complexity of human institutions of power.
To achieve this task, I will fi rst read Rousseau through Fanon, with pre-
liminary defi nitions of the creolizing practice at hand and then off er a more
detailed discussion of creolization. I hope to show in conclusion both the
relation of creolizing political theory to a correlative approach that will no
doubt be in the reader’s mind—namely, comparative political theory and
the study of politics more broadly.
Although a creolized political theory will not resolve all of the method-
ological and disciplinary problems involved in doing political theory today,
its addressing of defi ciencies of homogenous models and some misguided
conceptions of heterogeneity should, in a modest way, further the cause of a
political theory refl ective of actual human practices and the more adequate
instantiations of political legitimacy that might emerge from them.
Such are my goals.
For many readers, the words creolization and creolizing will be something of
a mystery. For others, both terms will immediately bring to mind particular
categories of creole people, most likely the descendants of mixed-race lead-
ers who waged the fi rst wave of independence movements from Portugal,
Spain, and France in the Luso-, Hispano-, and Francophone Americas. In
short, some explanation is in order.
Although the word creole fi rst emerged in the sixteenth century to de-
scribe new groups of people and then unique linguistic formations, I am
using creolization and creolizing in a way that is indebted to but distinct
from these meanings. Its signifi cance here, while informed by, is also dis-
crete from the various positions in social scientifi c debates over what exactly
transpired in the Caribbean communities out of which global modernity
fi rst emerged.
I am then using creolization and creolizing to name a particular approach
to politics and to the engagement and construction of political ideas. In
historical and social scientifi c literatures, creolization has referred to distinc-
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Introduction 3
tive ways in which opposed, unequal groups forged mutually instantiat-
ing practices in contexts of radical historical rupture, ones through which
people from elsewhere became indigenous to what had recently been foreign
places by breaking with the trajectories that their previous collective gene-
alogies would have anticipated. Although the progressive outcomes of such
processes were in no sense assured, because creolization generally focuses on
collective ends beyond those of basic coexistence and toleration, it draws
attention to the mutual transformation involved in molding that which
emerges as politically shared. It can therefore, I suggest, provide models for
how enriched political structures, discourses, forms of identifi cation, and
thinking might be envisioned. If in actual empirical instances, processes
of creolization are often hijacked by a small group of people who establish
themselves as the highest embodiment of a principle of mixture and radical
openness, when articulated as an approach to politics, creolization might of-
fer a powerful regulative ideal of how better approximations of a conception
of a shared, public good or general will can be constructed. In capturing
what it is both to remain painfully aware of the most salient of meaningful
diff erences while paying equal attention to how they might be eff ectively
synthesized in solidarities of political action, the generalizing of political will
might, through this lens, be understood as its progressive creolization.
As I will also explain at greater length, when turned to as a methodologi-
cal approach or as a way of doing political theory, creolizing, in the language
of Rousseau, seeks and at best embodies a general will rather than a will of
all. Not simply an aggregation of strategies, commitments, or texts tied to
interests of discrete actors and divergent disciplinary camps, creolizing is
instead an eff ort to rearticulate the world and, in this case, the project of
political life, that these diff erent approaches share. When creolizing, one is
galvanized by problems and questions that are envisaged as necessitating
drawing from what have historically become discrete disciplines to create
fresh ways of addressing urgent political debates. Unavoidably treating with
suspicion the notion that the prerequisite for their supposed rigor is the
growing insularity of academic disciplines, a creolized methodology then
does not seek the opposite extreme. In it disciplinary syntheses and mixture
are not pursued for their own sake. Instead, evident in a creolized method
is the shelving of an aversion to cross-fi eld frontiers through which access to
the full range of scholarly resources would be jettisoned. As such, our schol-
arly endeavors when creolized can be undertaken more coherently since we
are able to use materials that existing scholarly boundaries might encourage
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4 Introduction
us to lack, enabling us to foster the stitching together of answers we could
not otherwise fathom.
To reiterate, creolizing political theory is not achieved by aiming to ex-
emplify inclusivity and diversifi cation as inherent ideals but when cross-
fertilization of distinctive disciplinary developments is not averted by a re-
pugnance that would treat the products as crude, deformed impurities. Th e
nurturing of this alternative sensibility in turn demands that the imperatives
of the inquiry itself prevail over what might be mandated by dictates of dis-
ciplinary membership. Such forms of academic belonging are not rendered
wholly irrelevant—after all, in addition to their central role in the political
economy of hiring and promotion, disciplinary communities are sustained
by substantive shared commitments and understandings of some of what
constitute compelling foci for refl ection. Still, creolization as a methodolog-
ical approach reminds us that there is a point at which imperatives of loyalty
promise to produce decadent scholarship. Frequently hiding the historical
specifi city and contingent emergence of particular disciplinary formations,
reifying disciplinary identities can keep us from remembering that certain
categories, epistemic goals, and forms of evidence and argumentation were
developed to address a specifi c set of problems, in turn begging the question
of whether there are moments when the desire for the ongoing use of such
tools comes to trump their original purposes.
In sum, if, in political terms, we could understand creolization as the
generalizing of a shared, public will forged by individuals as they articulate
what they seek in and through collectivities that comprise a polity, we could
understand the creolization of political theory as its generalizing as well. In
this case, it involves rearticulating the shared world that is the condition of
possibility of each partial perspective and to which all, in confl icting ways,
refer. In other words, the political and methodological meanings of creoliza-
tion, while distinct, ultimately merge since disciplinary narrowness cannot,
as Rousseau and Fanon both contended, avoid having exclusive political
outcomes. Th is is not only because each would necessarily hide from view
essential dimensions of the full scope and meaning which political mod-
els should aim to express, but also because each would treat fault lines as
fi xed rather than precisely what is negotiated through political thought and
action.
Readers familiar with the terrain of political theory—in associating cre-
olization correctly with questions introduced by and associated with imperi-
alism, colonialism, diff erence, and inequality—will no doubt wonder about
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Introduction 5
its relationship to the politics of multiculturalism, discourses of hybridity,
and intellectual work undertaken beneath the rubrics of interdisciplinary
and comparative political theory.
As explored at greater length in Chapter 5, creolizing departs radically
from the guiding ideals of most brands of multiculturalism. For, while in-
ternally varied, multiculturalism—as an approach to politics, to the devel-
opment of school curricula, and to policy making—focuses on unequally
located, often formerly colonized or enslaved groups by demanding that
central political institutions off er opportunities for more meaningful enfran-
chisement through recognizing the distinctive cultural worlds in which each
is embedded. Th e surest way to demonstrate respect for these, this paradigm
advances, is through nurturing the conditions for their preservation, usually
through maintaining their relative separation and semisovereignty. Without
this, each would cease to be a position or site from which more hegemonic
worldviews could be critically evaluated and potentially enriched.
By contrast, in processes of creolization, a given pressing aim or project
trumps or prevails over principles that would in advance restrict by fi xing
a priori rules of engagement. In seeking to create viable forms out of what
has been and is suddenly locally available, one assumes that each, while
retaining some of its original character will, in being resituated and recom-
bined, remain itself by becoming something new and distinctive. Addition-
ally, unlike multiculturalism, which agrees to assume that political liber-
alism is a singular adequate model for the political present that might at
best be tweaked or made more accommodating, creolization emerged where
existing terms for social cooperation were absent, throwing into sharp relief
the politically determined, relational, and malleable nature of the worlds of
meaning to which culture refers.
Emerging after multiculturalism with the institutionalization of post-
colonial studies in Western Europe and the United States and ethnic studies
in the United States is the focus on hybridity and on bordercrossers associated
with Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Homi Bhabha (1994) among others. As
a challenge to the excessive crudeness of some brands of multiculturalism
and an essentialism associated with nationalist anticolonial movements, dis-
cussions of hybridity emphasized not only the internal diversity and dis-
sensions within particular cultures and communities but also the multiple,
competing forms of belonging experienced by any one individual. Th rough
a focus on the melancholic experience produced by the claims to, yet actual
absence of, an isomorphic relationship between individuals and the groups
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6 Introduction
of which they were a part, discourses of hybridity magnifi ed the position of
particular people whose contingencies of birth and identifi cation produced
experiences of unusually intense tugging demands of competing loyalties.
Although the insights borne of this position were thought to extend more
generally to illuminating the process of disavowing the constructed nature
of membership and belonging and the disciplining and repressive capacities
of both, hybridity often became more closely associated with the angst of
specifi c individuals whose mediating role ironically reasserted the logic of
pure, distinct groups through which they moved as a go-between. While
the existential insight produced by this homelessness or permanent in-
betweenness made for rich literary and philosophical refl ection, it often was
pitched against the spirit and forms of anticolonial and progressive politics
that required, however open-endedly, defi ned collectivities through which
people could struggle for more democratic conditions.
By contrast, while specifi c groups of creoles may have functioned in just
this way, supposedly embodying unique mixtures of political possibility and
epistemic insight through mediating between less or noncreolized groups,
creolizing as a process leaves none of the poles that “in-betweenness” ne-
gotiates intact. Similarly, while creolization in literary criticism has been
tied fundamentally to poststructural analyses of the repressive limitations of
collective forms of identity and identifi cation, as used here to describe an
approach to politics and to political theory, creolizing does not stop in the
moment of suspicion and critique that would create an impasse for most
eff orts at forging solidarities. Instead it aims to build from the insights of a
wariness of the highly imperfect ways in which these have been pursued so
that public identities might be better constructed.
Th ese distinctions among multiculturalism, hybridity, and creolization
are not only necessary for understanding the relevant terms of this text and
the diff erent stakes and priorities to which each is tied. Th ey are also indis-
pensable because the way in which culture is perceived overdetermines how
disciplines are envisioned and maintained. For example, the most frequent
contemporary response to a world (rather than only colonial outposts) of
merging center-periphery relations has been to turn in cultural matters to
multiculturalism and decreolization and in scholarly ones toward interdisci-
plinarity and hyperspecialization.
Interdisciplinarity, as opposed to transdisciplinarity and creolization,
treats disciplines in the same way that multiculturalism treats cultures: as a
smorgasbord of options illuminated through understanding their discrete-
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Introduction 7
ness rather than the constitutive relations and tensions among them. If,
by contrast, hyperspecialization acknowledges shared beginnings of now
distinct endeavors, it is an instance of decreolization. For scholars of cre-
ole linguistics, decreolization describes the isolated trajectories of once only
slightly diff erent varieties of a single tongue that in their separate movements
become less and less intelligible to one another. As they increasingly refl ect
the articulation of tinier, circumscribed fragments of experience, they come
to lack the linguistic generality of a once shared genealogy. When made an
orientation to scholarly endeavor, decreolization involves valorizing the de-
liberate move away from the generalization I have been describing. For the
sake of making each academic niche more coherently itself, more rigorous
through autonomous diff erentiation, each stakes out such distinct territories
through specifying particular foci, forms of evidence, and methodologies
that it prizes and through which it is defi nitively marked. Creolization, as
I will explore further in the conclusion of this book, introduces a diametri-
cally opposed trajectory, grounded in values and priorities understood fun-
damentally through the lens of politics and thereby through generality.
Still there is irony in the project of creolizing political theory: When
explicitly sought as a political program and as a method, creolization can
come to resemble its multicultural and interdisciplinary alternatives more
than its advocates would allow. It too can become a celebration of diversity
for its own sake, depoliticizing the challenge represented by such competing
and confl icting sites of experience, insight, and identifi cation. By contrast,
processes of creolization are most pronounced when settled coordinates to
which symbolic forms referred are radically interrupted and when factors
that would render creolization impossible are made absent. With theory as
with politics, creolizing will not emerge when it is deliberately pursued. It
will instead be the inevitable outcome when we recall a larger telos, in this
instance, a galvanizing concern with understanding, forging, and protecting
a distinct domain of political life so long as we are not straight-jacketed by
commitments that would frame creolizing itself (or the possibility of bet-
ter realizing our aims and that which we are through the possibility of our
becoming something other than what we’ve been) as illicit.
Th e juxtaposition of Rousseauian and Fanonian thought in which much
of this book is engaged is made possible by a creolized as opposed to a com-
parative approach. Why?
As I explore in more detail in the conclusion of this book, within the US
academy, no new development has created more disciplinary space for the
F6183.indb 7F6183.indb 7 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
8 Introduction
project of creolizing political thought than comparative political theorizing.
Still, for all of its inner diversity as an emergent subfi eld, the framework of
comparativism, even if only strategically engaged, cannot entirely divorce
itself from the suggestion that it off ers an exploration of confl icts over terms
of social cooperation from within discrete religious and moral traditions the
boundaries of which remain distinct. Once the search for distinctness and
clearly recognizable diff erence become a requirement, several other prob-
lems emerge. Among them are what can and cannot be made to appear as
suffi ciently similar and diff erent. As I suggest, drawing on the work on dis-
avowal of Sibylle Fischer and Susan Buck-Morss, even if we recognize and
acknowledge the inevitable blurriness of such boundaries, this is not enough
since it might be precisely out of the most creolized of circumstances that
what we consider the height of intellectual contributions of any given em-
pire or civilization in fact proceed. Indeed we might be masking the very
insights about culture and politics that we are aiming to reveal in calling
“Chinese” or “Indian” or “Iranian” what are actually rich examples of the
greatest fruits of creolization. In them, distinct political insights are molded
through articulating fresh generalities out of situations that interrupt longer,
more continuous and traditional ways of understanding the many dimen-
sions of projects of collective living. Exactly as previous genealogies are most
strained and shown to be lacking in solutions, do people combine elements
of these pasts, now resituated, with radically other ones in ways that produce
political thought fl avored enough by older forms to be recognizable but
that is also disarmingly new. Still, if some of the work under the conceptual
framework of disavowal cautions that any hegemony will be marked by the
inevitable limitations that preceded them, creolization makes this worry an
ongoing guide rather than an obstacle to forging fresh collectivities.
In other words, for a comparative political theorist, Rousseau and Fanon
might for multiple reasons not be ideal candidates for shared exploration.
First, they may be considered neither suffi ciently similar nor suffi ciently
diff erent. After all, while they are both products of the Francophone world,
they were neither direct temporal nor spatial contemporaries. Th is does not
present problems here, however, since the aspiration is not to show the rela-
tive distinctness of the respective worlds of each but instead what happens to
concerns with the relationship of questions of method to those of political
legitimacy in one and then the other for the sake of the world of both then
and for us now. In so doing, I do not explore the ways in which Fanon takes
Rousseau’s ideas only to apply them to a new terrain, producing interesting,
F6183.indb 8F6183.indb 8 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Introduction 9
historically specifi c insights. Instead I witness in Fanon the critical engage-
ment of challenges introduced through colonial relations to explore their
implications for Rousseau’s conceptions of method and legitimacy. In so
doing recognizable concerns—with decadence and inequality—are taken
up and necessarily altered, forming a distinctive new part of a shared intel-
lectual genealogy. It is because Fanon is so much more than applied Rousseau
that I suggest that he might be understood as a kindred spirit and better
intellectual heir than fi gures like Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls. Creoliza-
tion, in this sense, need not always refer to what transpires in colonized
settings or among the downtrodden and wretched. After all, unanticipated
trajectories in the development of ideas and practices can transpire wherever
there is literal or metaphorical migration. Still, the insistence that creoliza-
tion not only involve distinctive syntheses, but those that would embody
better generalizations, more meaningful approximations of the needs and
hopes of the society at large, does imply an ongoing relation to those seeking
progressive political transformation. Put diff erently, those who benefi t from
partial arrangements masked as benefi tting all are more likely to oppose ac-
tively the appearance of more legitimate alternatives that clearly reveal their
claim to generality as phony. As such, they are more likely to reject creolized
products as illicit, impure, or otherwise undesirable.
Additionally and fi nally, this book is an exploration of creolization as
opposed to its alternatives to the extent that it can be read as a sustained
exploration of the meaning and implications of what Rousseau called “gen-
erality” or of how it is that what abiding diff erences have in common can be
meaningfully articulated in and through political activity. As such I begin
with Rousseau because while not the fi rst to use the language of “the gen-
eral” as the distinct scope of the project of politics, he was the one to explore
most compellingly its requirements and possibilities. Part of this turned on
articulating its fragility by outlining the ways of thinking, being, and acting
that could nurture or undercut it in both his early writings on the nature of
inquiry in the arts and sciences as well as in his later, explicitly political re-
fl ections. While Rousseau was not a creolized thinker in the sense for which
I will argue, he was a genius of a generalist, contributing uniquely as he
moved among and between a great variety of fi elds and media. Part of what
distinguished him from other renaissance men of his day were the sensibili-
ties that ran through all of his engagements.
Frantz Fanon, as I will show, provocatively suggested that politics and
ethics described the relationship between selves and others while colonialism
F6183.indb 9F6183.indb 9 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
10 Introduction
created selves and subothers and the mechanisms through which their non-
relations were administered. While Rousseau did not draw on and enrich
his own ideas through the thought of such fundamental “subothers”—his
engagements with them were imagined and projected—they were essential
to his understanding of how one dislodged and upset the deceptive self-
perceptions that created the greatest obstacles to regenerative thought and
politics. If Rousseau introduced new ideas and orientations into the history
of political refl ection, exemplifying original syntheses of tremendous variety,
these were not creolized in their own right. Instead they invited a creolization
that could and would be undertaken by others, most especially, as examined
here, by Frantz Fanon who shared the position that standards for intellectual
and political legitimacy were intimately and inevitably interwoven.
To say that societies such as those in the (Franco-, Anglo-, Hispano-, Luso-
phone, and Dutch) Caribbean were creolized is to insist that their life prac-
tices were those that emerged out of situations in which previously uncon-
nected people—a settler class, slaves, dwindling indigenous populations,
and subsequent waves of laborers—whose mutual recognition was unprec-
edented, were thrown suddenly together in ways that abruptly disrupted
previous more coherent and discrete orders of collective meaning. Out of
such violent ruptures, new perspectives based largely on reinvention and
recontextualization began to take shape. Strikingly, those who unequally
occupied such societies did not remain sealed off neatly from one another
but instead lived within relations marked by mundane dependency, antago-
nism, intimate and complex interpenetration. Perhaps most signifi cantly,
what resulted were illicit blendings or those that, unlike other instances of
cultural mixture, referred to symbolic creativities combining contributions
from those thought incapable of it and from those with greater power.
While creolization has been used to describe particular products—lan-
guages, music, and foods from Haitian Creole to calypso and gumbo—
these more signifi cantly turn our attention to the process of which they are
an expression. In it, symbolic forms with previously distinct genealogies
linked to disparate and confl icting political and structural locations con-
verge to elaborate an indigenous human world in a locale previously home
to few or none of the people so implicated. Remarkably, in the results one
simultaneously recognizes the presence of both elements that previously had
separate histories and the unique form born of their combination. In those
F6183.indb 10F6183.indb 10 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Introduction 11
instances when native populations did survive the processes of settler colo-
nialism, the coordinates of their world—to which prior ideas, customs, and
practices referred—were radically and permanently disrupted. As a result,
while facing intense external and internal pressures to off er themselves as
embodiments of unsullied authenticity and to index their autonomy ac-
cordingly, it was only through intermarriage, mixture, and creolization that
such communities were able to survive.
Given what has just been said, why would we want to take a concept
that emerges out of the violent displacement of plantation societies of early
global modernity and use it as a model for our approaches to constructive
theorizing? Few, after all, would choose to occupy or mimic such situations.
Why would what many have framed as the particularity of the Caribbean
phenomenon off er insights to illuminate a now global predicament?
Th e explorations that went on under the name of creolization aimed to
explain forms of mixture that were not supposed to occur. In the dread and
curiosity that they thereby inspired, they also drew attention to seeming
anomalies that proved, if in more rapid and intense terms, in fact to be
prototypes for understanding what transpires more generally as stratifi ed,
displaced peoples converge. Capturing the closure and openness, sedimen-
tation and fl uidity, identifi cation and nonidentifi cation that eff orts to illu-
minate the workings of culture consistently overemphasize in one direction
or the other, creolization therefore off ers a better account of the nature of
the reality in which political life and theorizing proceed. We would therefore
do well to have it inform our methods of inquiry because, as already stated,
however unwittingly, frameworks for understanding symbolic life overdetermine
how it is that we conceive of the disciplines themselves.
Th e discipline of political science, in what for many might be surprising,
was historically heavily creolized. Drawing on the full range of resources
relevant to understanding the political world, its early participants forged
a shared fi eld language through which those working on divergent ques-
tions could communicate their separate fi ndings (even if incompletely) to
one another. Many constitutive works in this area of inquiry could as eas-
ily be considered studies in history, psychology, or sociology as in theory.
Th ey could be defi ned in multiple ways precisely because their authors were
less concerned with demonstrating subfi eld mastery or loyalty than with
grasping problems larger than any single, historically contingent scholarly
niche.
F6183.indb 11F6183.indb 11 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
12 Introduction
More recently, however, the various subfi elds that comprise political sci-
ence have undergone processes of radical decreolization, or, as I have al-
ready described, of moving along increasingly isolated (often also framed
as autonomous) trajectories that cease to be mutually intelligible. Rigor
and sophistication are ever more premised on fl uency in specialized areas
in which good work can only be meaningfully undertaken if one devotes
oneself entirely to mastering its specifi c language and norms. Th e diffi cul-
ties with this are many: Most immediately, it means that the larger synthetic
work at which a more focused inquiry is supposed to aim is entirely lost
to very complex treatments of increasingly smaller issues. In these circum-
stances, disciplinary languages become less the province of the develop-
ment of concepts that facilitate broader comprehension and more the gate-
keeping devices that assist in artifi cially narrowing the pool of who would
dare enter.
To creolize political theory, by contrast, is to break with identity- oriented
conceptions of disciplines and methods, those through which one aims
to make oneself and one’s work isomorphic with seemingly preexisting con-
ceptions of what a disciplinary community indicates one must be and must
not do.
Th e creolizing processes of New World plantation societies explored by
social scientists operated diff erently in distinct domains. As Robert Chaun-
denson (with Salikoko S. Mufwene) has described it, “the centrifugal force”
of the settler class was most pronounced in the linguistic terrain and in oth-
ers most suff used with the written word. It is precisely this uneven quality
of creolization and its legacies that informed Paget Henry’s (2000) seminal
Caliban’s Reason: Henry observed that while creolization was fully evident
in Caribbean folklore, music, and theater, when one turned to Caribbean
philosophy, the same process was skewed and incomplete. In this “most
quintessentially rational area of inquiry and work” (Henry 2000, 70), the
ongoing presumed authority of Europe continued. In response, Henry ar-
gued, intellectuals needed to undertake a project of reenfranchising African
and Afro-Caribbean philosophies, recentering long-concealed areas of the
imagination and reestablishing their ability to accumulate authority. Reject-
ing “negative evaluations that block African and European elements from
creatively coming together” (88), creolization, in this context, involved the
act of deliberately indigenizing theoretical endeavors, of drawing on local
resources of reason and refl ection to illuminate local aspirations and assum-
ing that the fruit of these particular endeavors could, as had proved true
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Introduction 13
of their European counterparts, be valuable in themselves and to projects
elsewhere.
Creolizing of political theory would thus preliminarily involve at least the
following components.
First, a particular orientation toward historical work in political thought,
in which we repeatedly ask if we are paying due attention to the geographies
within which we situate our subjects, whether we are not reading back into
them post facto conceptions of proximity and distance, actual and imagined
discreteness, particularly when investigating sources of inspiration, relations
of indebtedness, and other forms of infl uence. When creolizing political
theory we must be sure that we are not naturalizing and simplifying once
contested geopolitical relations only later (and even then incompletely) so-
lidifi ed. An excellent example of such an endeavor is Susan Buck-Morss’s re-
cent exploration of the implications of Hegel’s more than likely scrupulous
following of the events of the Haitian Revolution when crafting his most
seminal formulation of the nature of freedom. Creolizing both Hegel and
a pivotal concept in the canon of theory, Buck-Morss (2000; 2009) explores
why an obvious connection in its day (between the press surrounding aboli-
tionist struggles that culminated in the fi rst New World Black Republic and
philosophical considerations of the progress of freedom in history) could
subsequently be ignored with authority. Perhaps ironically, rooted in greater
attention to the past and present of creolization, historians might unearth
questions the answering of which would render their historicism more rig-
orous, even in its own terms.
Central clues for such work can be found by looking for traces of people
rendered only in marks of their evasion. For example, when many readers
encounter Niccolò Machiavelli’s Th e Prince, they do not imagine the world
from which it came as one that had been dominated by two Muslim em-
pires whose lengthy presence in Southern Europe had led to extensive inter-
mixing of people, cultures, and ideas. Still, the Reconquista or expelling of
the Jews and Moors by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand is one of Machi-
avelli’s examples of religion used eff ectively to consolidate political power.
What happens as readers, if we move beyond pointing out the mere pres-
ence of this example, to reimagining what it means for understanding the
conditions that fostered Renaissance republican theory? At the very least, it
would suggest a diff erent way of narrating the situations that produced what
are considered historic moments in the development of political theory. In
F6183.indb 13F6183.indb 13 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
14 Introduction
this case, rather than an expression of a pure and unsullied, distinct Roman
tradition (or of fi fth-century Athens or early modern England for that mat-
ter), world-transforming insights were instead the fruit of eff orts to address
new dilemmas thrown open by the rupturing of genealogies of symbolic life
that, under multicultural models and its sensibilities, are usually lamented.
Second, creolizing political theory (in emulating the situations that pro-
duced some of the richest moments in the history of such refl ection) in-
volves conceptualizing the task of theorizing in such a way that we create
conversations among thinkers and ideas that may at fi rst appear incapable
of having actually taken place, that confound at least one conception of the
dictates of rigorous scholarship. One example is this book, which suggests
that one might trace a richer genealogy from Rousseau if one connects him
to what has been called the black radical thought tradition than to those
that move only from Western Europe to the Anglo–United States. Another
example is Roxanne Euben’s (1999) Enemy in the Mirror, which emphasizes
the kindred character of the criticisms of European modernity within the
continent and in the work of Sayyid Qutb.
Pivotal to this is a third defi ning orientation toward, in the language of
Paget Henry (2009b), the concept of the knowing subject. It is one that
necessarily rejects a structure that dominates most eff orts at cosmopolitan
theorizing, in which those from Western Europe and the United States are
invited to places that together comprise the rest of the world. Visitors lend
locals cultural capital, authority, power, and legitimacy through the fact of
having visited from a small set of highly elite institutions in exchange for
temporary encounters with intellectuals of the Global South who, engaged
primarily as informants, off er their lives as evidence for the supposed au-
thenticity of the purportedly more abstract, historic, and universal insights
of their visitors. Such approaches remain reliant on what has been referred
to by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as the “savage slot.” At the core of eighteenth-
century utopian and anthropological writings, Trouillot (2003) explains,
was a turn to the life practices of people thought to occupy times and places
stubbornly outside the otherwise inexorable progress of history. Evidence of
the supposed nature of their lives was used in arguments among Europeans
about what could viably be conceived as alternative futures. Th e “savage
slot” was the ultimate empty signifi er: it could be made to demonstrate
that people were not necessarily hungrily materialistic nor egotistical, and
that those living in modern Europe therefore need not, for instance, ac-
F6183.indb 14F6183.indb 14 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Introduction 15
cept the inevitability of a capitalist future wrought with narrow individual-
ism. To creolize political theory necessarily expands who is involved in the
theoretical dimensions of such discussion and as such the structure of what
functions as evidential. In this sense, the work of creolizing political theory,
which is necessary to the articulation of a global future, is signifi cantly more
advanced outside of the Global North where, not always but often, scholars
are compelled to follow and engage more hegemonic debates as well as criti-
cal responses to them that are local.
Finally, the implications of creolization extend beyond political theory
to political science more generally. Th ere is considerable recent discussion
of the place of political theory in the larger discipline much of which as-
sumes that work of our empirical counterparts clearly meets requirements
to which we theorists are held and often found wanting. In one recent con-
tribution to this ongoing debate, Andrew Rehfeld (2010) pointed out that
those whose work has become most infl uential in the subfi eld are precisely
those trained in a pure discipline external to political science. He mentioned
as examples the philosophy training of the late Iris Marion Young and of
Charles Mills and the historical one of Quentin Skinner. Th e same might
be said of empirical political science: given the increased value placed on
innovation at the level of hyperspecialized methods, one might be better
equipped to contribute to contemporary political science if one were trained
in advanced economics and mathematics and simply approached politics as
one’s fi eld of application. Th is trend betrays a preference for a methodologi-
cal purity that departs from the discipline’s history. It is an ironic one in
which legitimacy as a political scientist is a stamp imported from disciplin-
ary locations outside of it and rigor and sophistication are associated with
ever more specialized terms, even as these narrow the questions that can
thereby be illuminated and the scope of people with whom fi ndings could
be discussed and explored.
Creolizing the study of political science would move in the opposite
direction, toward rearticulating the world to which increasingly separate
pieces of the fi eld refer in ways that can embolden scholars and students to
comprehend and participate in forging the shape of the political domain
they are entering. If this, rather than narrower career-related concerns, is our
primary concern, we would not see our work as better because it can only
be understood by a tiny handful of similarly trained professionals also fl uent
in our respective disciplinary dialects. We would instead aim to take what
F6183.indb 15F6183.indb 15 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
16 Introduction
is most valuable in respective approaches and use them to illuminate shared
dilemmas in ways that would enable us to reenliven a broader fi eld language
through which we might articulate what might be done.
Creolizing theory and methods through which we investigate political
life is not without its limitations as I explore in more detail in Chapter 5.
Briefl y stated here, creolizing processes emerge precisely in contexts of inter-
ruption and loss, in which continuities are broken and people must work
with what remains to proceed. If one’s approach to symbolic life and dis-
ciplinary formations is to try as comprehensively as possible to keep their
many elements living through as close-to-perfect duplication as possible,
creolization will off er little beyond the challenge to all forms of conserva-
tism: that for anything to remain meaningful it must be transformed as it is
resituated again and again in each new generation and circumstance. In ad-
dition, processes of creolization cannot themselves determine the conditions
or content of creolizing convergences. No single person or group controls
the contributory elements or the unequal ways in which they combine. Al-
though, as scholars, in our own work, we are engaged in enterprises that are
more deliberate and controlled, it is for this reason that I advance creoliza-
tion as necessary to but certainly not suffi cient for the project of a vibrant
political theory for the future.
Th is particular instance of creolizing, although a particularly compelling
example, is by no means the only one possible. After all, with Rousseau
and Fanon alone, one might fruitfully creolize the former through engage-
ment with Anténor Firmin or C. L. R. James or W. E. B. Du Bois or might
explore the ways in which his political aspirations were critically resituated
and reworked among New World formally educated creoles, such as Simon
Bolivar, who studied these writings in spite of their legal prohibition (Lynch
2006, chap. 2). One might also creolize Mary Shelley through a coupled
investigation with Fanon. In other words, the enterprise undertaken here is
intended as inaugural and inviting, not exhaustive.
While Rousseau was not a fi gure that one might single out for explicit,
elaborated progressive explorations on questions of race or colonialism,
even his critics have considered him to be the thinker who introduced what
it was to undertake a dialectical treatment of the project of modern life. Th e
fundamentally ambivalent and melancholic character of the orientation of
his writing—of being shaped by aspirations that one simultaneously incor-
porates, challenges, refashions, and transcends—is also a defi ning feature
of the tradition of black radical thought, of which Fanon is a crucial and
F6183.indb 16F6183.indb 16 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Introduction 17
canonical member. In other words, we take up Rousseau, not to shield him
from instances of necessary and useful criticism or because “he had it all
right,” but to suggest that evidence of the ongoing richness of his thought is
that it is worth engaging and amending. Fanon off ers resources for just this
creative expansion.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I turn fi rst to Rousseau and Fanon’s challenging
comments concerning method. Both urged writers and readers to grapple
with their conclusions that our approaches to inquiry could never easily
be separated from the worlds of which we are part. If for Rousseau, it was
diffi cult for work in the arts and sciences to be anything but an expression
of extreme decadence, for Fanon, they lent scientifi c credibility to colonial
relations. From there, we turn to a discussion of Rousseau’s general will
and to Fanon’s national consciousness, closing with a discussion of how the
relationship between Rousseau and Fanon that I have undertaken is an ex-
ample of creolization. I conclude with some suggestions about the broader
applicability of creolization to discussions of comparative political theory
and methods in political science at large.
F6183.indb 17F6183.indb 17 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
18
1
Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
Th ey will begin, according to their customary practice, by establishing a diff erent question
according to their whim; they will make me resolve it as it suits them. In order to attack me
more conveniently, they will make me reason, not in my manner but in theirs. Th ey will
skillfully turn the eyes of the Reader away from the essential object to fi x them to the right
and to the left; they will battle a phantom and claim to have vanquished me: but I will have
done what I ought to do, and I begin.
—jean-jacques rousseau
When Rousseau provocatively diagnosed the Enlightenment as one more
example of the moral decay of empires and off ered his challenging portrait
of political legitimacy he reversed the geopolitical values of his day, sug-
gesting that it was in Europe’s backwaters where freedom and virtue had
a present and future. He tied the alternatives that he prized not only to
this periphery but to its greater reaches in the brown and black world, see-
ing in them the elements of the ancient political past that he hoped might
still materialize, if now in modern conditions. Still, if cast heroically and as
evidence of the universal equality of human beings, his was an imaginary
Carib who, while off ering an illuminating critical mirror, was a fundamen-
tal expression of Rousseau’s highly European world. Rousseau’s gestures
toward creolized inquiry, clearly informed by his own real and imagined
personal alienation, stimulated theoretical challenges unlikely otherwise to
have emerged. Fanon’s thought takes these where Rousseau could not reach,
informing them with insights borne directly out of the contradictions and
challenges of the creolized Francophone empire.
F6183.indb 18F6183.indb 18 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 19
introductory paradoxes
Rousseau lived for sixty-six years, all of which fell squarely in the eighteenth
century. Born in Geneva, when fi nding himself once again past curfew
and locked outside of its gates, he fl ed his apprenticeship to wander the
Swiss Catholic environs and those of Northern Italy. While a consummate
traveler, he moved to Paris at thirty and but for his brief time in Venice (as
secretary to the French Ambassador Comte de Montaigue) and when seek-
ing refuge in Neuchâtel and then England (initially through the arrange-
ments of Scottish philosopher David Hume), he remained in and then just
outside of it for the rest of his life. In addition to authoring Julie or the New
Heloise, arguably the most widely selling novel of his century, Rousseau
composed several successful operas, pioneering work in autobiographical re-
fl ection, and enduring studies in music theory and botany. While responses
to his controversial educational and political writings drove him into exile,
many revolutionaries sought to institutionalize their often-paradoxical spirit
through the tumultuous events that culminated in the founding of the
French Republic. Th e challenging diagnoses and conceptual alternatives
that he proff ered remain the focus of extensive criticism, teaching, debate,
and scholarship to this day.
Frantz Fanon, by contrast, began his thirty-six-year life just less than
two hundred years later on the Caribbean and New World Francophone
island of Martinique. Spending most of his brief adulthood in North Af-
rica, his political writings became the primary articulation of the cause of
anti colonial struggle as one of twentieth-century revolutionary humanism.
Th e innovative practices developed and instituted under his directorship at
Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, those that tied actively resisting mun-
dane practices of dehumanization to the very possibility of mental health,
became indispensable to subsequent research and practice in existential psy-
chiatry. When he died under the name of Ibrahim Fanon in a hospital in
Bethesda, Maryland, his body was carried to lie in state in Tunisia before
being placed in a martyr’s graveyard in Aïn Kerma, eastern Algeria. Had
he been able to resist his body’s rapidly spreading leukemia, he might have
celebrated the culmination of the collective struggles through which Al-
gerian men and women were to emerge as political subjects and therefore
as “adults.” However, the radicality of how he defi ned the ending of co-
lonial relations would no doubt have put him in direct confl ict with the
newly powerful. Still, while remaining at best ambivalently engaged by most
F6183.indb 19F6183.indb 19 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
20 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
French scholars, Fanon has been canonized in the names of streets, schools,
and health centers in much of the nonwhite Francophone world and in his-
toric and ongoing fi ghts for freedom in Iran and South Africa, Cuba, Brazil,
India, Iran, South Africa, Palestine, and the United States.
Rousseau learned to speak, think, read, and write in the French language;
his ingenious energies were devoted to French debates. At the same time, he
was, often in ways that he more emphatically emphasized than did others,
very much an outsider. Having descended in childhood from the patrician
class of his late mother to the artisan one of his father, and then having
to support himself from his teenage years onward, he labored in various
stations—from that of domestic servant, tutor, and music copyist to sec-
retary for both the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie—before becoming a
recognized composer, novelist, and theorist. He said of himself, “Without
having an état of my own, I have known and lived in them all from lowest
to highest, excepting only the throne” (quoted in Damrosch 2005, 235). On
another occasion, he refl ected, “Th e manner of life I chose, which was iso-
lated and unpretentious and made me almost a nullity on earth, put me in
a position to observe and compare all conditions from peasants to the great”
(ibid.). Even when disavowed by his countrymen, Rousseau identifi ed pri-
marily with a mythologized rendition of the Swiss republic of his birth.
It was neither a place of big, urbane cities nor a history of making history.
Perhaps as a result, its citizens’ loyalties were local rather than cosmopolitan.
As Jean Starobinski (1988, 333–51), another Swiss-French political thinker,
would stress in the twentieth century, Rousseau embodied a prototype of
a “doubly insider, doubly excluded” position, through imagination and in
prose fashioning in terms of universal signifi cance a political home more
hospitable than the options in fact available to him.
Fanon fi rst left his home of Fort-de-France to enlist in World War II so
that he could fi ght directly for the restoration of the French Republic and
through it for, as he is reputed to have said, “the cause of human dignity.” It
was during his military service on North African bases (in Casablanca, Bejaia,
and Oran) which brought together men from all reaches of the French terri-
tory, his subsequent studies in Lyon, and psychological work in the colony,
Algeria, however, that he so acutely grasped that Martinique and the rest of
the Antilles were indeed part of France, sharing its Parisian capital (Macey
2002, 32), but were, more specifi cally, among places inhabited by France’s
(internally variegated) nègres. As the opening narration in Cheik Djemaï’s
fi lm preview put it: as a Martinican, Fanon’s encounters with French culture
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 21
made him an Algerian revolutionary. As he would later explore in depth in
his fi rst book, Black Skin White Masks (hereafter BSWM), Antilleans were
forcefully cast as “the unconscious, liminal shadow, the repressed and unde-
sirable side of the imperial European subject that has racialized its identity
as white” (Henry 2005, 96). In spite of signifi cant diff erences, this role of
“the black” proved global, shared as much in Tunis and Fort-de-France as in
Accra, Durban, Sydney, and Tripoli. Th inking through the contradictions
it uniquely revealed therefore proved of universal value.
Seemingly divided by centuries and oceans, in other words, Rousseau
and Fanon in fact shared a geopolitical world that spanned time and space
through the shape and project of the Francophone empire. If in substantively
diff erent degrees, Geneva, Martinique, and the colonies of North Africa all
lay within its shadows. Ironically perhaps, it was from here that so many
quintessentially “French writers” would emerge—not only Rousseau and
Fanon but also Jean-Paul Sartre (from Alsace-Lorraine), Albert Camus,
Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière (all born in Algeria). Anticipating
this tradition, Rousseau and Fanon’s sensibilities, if in divergent ways, were
as fundamentally shaped by aspirations emanating from this center as by
what it was to constitute its periphery.
By Fanon’s time, those of the “New World” had become France’s old
colonies. In Rousseau’s day, however, the tantalizingly incomplete bits
of information that emerged from European confrontations with “newly
discovered” societies were formative, pervasively impacting the conscious-
ness of generations of eighteenth-century political and moral writers. As
Michel-Rolph Trouillot has provocatively suggested, the unquenchable thirst
of French reading publics for such materials, “reports” from seemingly un-
touched domains, were sustenance for utopic longings. Few cared if these
had any accurate or well-observed basis, whether they were ethnographic or
fantastic (Trouillot 2003, 14–18). For each promised to reveal the natures of
radically other peoples who in their radical otherness could supply a defi n-
ing affi rmation of or contrast from locally sought-after possibilities. While
the Cape of Good Hope was as ripe material as were feral children of Europe
or native Greenlanders, few sites were as much the focus of French Edenic
projection as the islands of the Caribbean, in particular those of the French
Antilles.
Still, while there were no modern European political thinkers whose work
could remain unaff ected by the many implications of their nations’ imperial
and colonial policies, it would be a mistake to describe the France of Rous-
F6183.indb 21F6183.indb 21 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
22 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
seau’s day as avowedly creolized. Indeed, great eff orts were made to avoid the
nation’s creolization, to keep the infl uences of the colonies highly controlled
and separate, discrete from local self-understandings. Th is was a remarkable
feat when one considers that by 1780, half of France’s exports to other Eu-
ropean countries came from Guadeloupe and Martinique, Saint-Domingue
(now Haiti), French Guiana, Louisiana, Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and Isle
de France (now Mauritius). Many French workers were employed in com-
mercial exchanges with the colonies and tropical goods that had once been
luxury items quickly became continental staples. In the 1630s the French
colonies had grown tobacco through the labor of peasants who crossed the
Atlantic as indentured laborers. When sugar replaced tobacco, small plan-
tations grew into large establishments and France in the 1670s and 1680s
entered the Atlantic slave trade. It would import four times as many slaves
to the Caribbean as the British did to its North American (not including its
Caribbean) colonies, with the sugar-producing island of Martinique alone
importing more slaves than the US mainland states combined (Trouillot
1995, 17; Curtin 1969, 268). Indeed, after Britain and Portugal, France was,
in the eighteenth century, the third largest supplier of enslaved Africans to
the Americas.
While France’s economy was radically transformed, in other words, its
national self-perceptions were not. Indeed, the story of French New World
holdings, besides those in Canada, remained largely marginal (Dobie
2010). Th is was not accidental. Much theoretical and legislative energy
was devoted to making what transpired across the ocean appear remote.
Arguments over the moral signifi cance of the physical diff erences of Africans
abounded, for instance, along with the soon-after-mid-century fashion of
women of high society replacing their domesticated parrots and petit chien
(little dogs) with small black boys. Most especially on the rise, absent at the
end of the seventeenth century, was the association of blackness with ser-
vitude and corresponding eff orts to assure that blacks and whites remained
separated through limiting the numbers of Africans, slave or free, within
France itself: the royal edict of 1716 (in the year of Rousseau’s birth) and dec-
laration in 1738 stated that slaves could only remain on French soil for the
time required for their religious education and apprenticeship in a trade.
Slaves of those who did not comply, it was threatened, could be confi scated
and returned to the colonies. Failing to slow the stream, the Police de Noirs
passed in 1777 (the year before Rousseau’s death), prohibited the entry of
all nonwhites onto mainland French soil. Such policies proved eff ective:
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 23
the number of enslaved blacks registered with the admiralty of Bordeaux in
France dropped from 1,098 to 102 after 1756. While the actual fi gures were
surely larger, estimates suggest that in the late 1770s there were no more than
four to fi ve thousand enslaved or free blacks living in France in an overall
population of 28 million while there were about three times as many in
England, in its total population of 10 million (Dobie 2010, 6; Boulle 2007,
196; Noël 2006, 95; Braidwood 1994). In other words, as the distinctness
of France from its colonies became ever more diffi cult to disentangle, a se-
ries of theoretical and legal measures were enacted with the aim to shore up
national and racial boundaries. Th ese were designed, writes Dobie, to keep
slavery and slaves “out of sight and mind in safely distant ‘off shore’ loca-
tions” (2010, 5). One legacy of such gestures, even if they could never be
completely successful, is the ease with which one might with academic cred-
ibility distance a Rousseau from a Fanon in the subsequent study of both.
It was not that Rousseau and other eighteenth-century writers associated
with the movements of Enlightenment did not write, often critically, about
slavery. Indeed, as with classical republican thought, it was usually against
(abstract, individualized, or ancient forms of ) servitude and subordination
to the arbitrary will of others that the very meaning of freedom and con-
sent were elaborated. Some also emphasized the hypocrisy and cruelty of
European imperialists or were signifi cantly infl uenced by sustained inter-
action with the writings or artistic work of major non-Europeans. Rousseau
has been deservedly known as European modernity’s fi rst radical internal
critic precisely because of his unrelenting indictment of the desirability of
its model of civilization and progress. At the same time, he and his con-
temporaries were able to write from a geopolitical world that, if enlarged
and changing, remained largely intact. If imperfectly and without full self-
awareness, they could, for the most part, determine how and when it was
that the literal or fi gurative Carib would enter. Th ey could, in addition, opt
for frozen references to him rather than to those of his eff ective decimation
and retreat to the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent by 1755. It is in this
sense that the France of Rousseau’s day was markedly diff erent from the
heavily creolized Martinique in which Fanon was raised.
We still can and must ask in turning to Rousseau: How is it that a man
who entered intellectual history by problematizing the possibility of pro-
gressive inquiry became one of the progenitors of the contemporary social
sciences? Why was it he, a fi gure so antipathetic to conventional concep-
tions of the future who articulated hypotheses and dilemmas that carved
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24 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
scholarly terrains that would only blossom a century or two later? What
are we to make of the paradox that a theorist who tried rigorously to locate
himself outside of or anterior to Enlightenment civilization produced such
a methodologically synthetic, if not creolized, body of work that the associa-
tion that meets to engage his legacy today draws together members of such a
broad range fi elds that they are not always mutually intelligible?
Many students of the human sciences aspire through the turn to method
to make a science of the study of politics. Th ey hope in so doing to arrive at
law-like patterns and behaviors with predictive powers, taking the position
that these are most likely to emerge when they eradicate the impact of them-
selves as human beings on the research they are conducting. Th is is not only
impossible. It is ultimately undesirable, too. It is not possible because the
best these eff orts achieve is a humanly envisaged image of what it would be
like to study the human world as unaff ected by human beings. We cannot
but perceive and refl ect as embodied and situated creatures whose sense of
meaning is fundamentally informed by our past and present individual and
collective commitments. What is more, in such eff orts we make the subjects
of our studies no longer the people that they in fact remain and their inter-
actions other than what they will of necessity continue to be.
Both Rousseau, on whom I will focus in this chapter, and Fanon, on
whom we will soon devote more attention, aimed to illuminate the para-
doxes faced by human beings, taking seriously, as socially embedded crea-
tures, the challenge of distinguishing the necessary and inevitable from that
which could be otherwise. In an eff ort to assure that they did not simply
reproduce the coordinates of what existed as if features of the natural world,
both fi gures sought critical distance from what Michel Foucault would later
call the dominating epistemes of their day. Rousseau and Fanon were both
weary of what were uncritically treated as authoritative or esteemed meth-
ods. Maintaining a skeptical view did not mean that the work they carried
out was without method, however. Instead legitimate methods emerge in
their work as synthetic and creolized ones or those that draw together di-
verse resources previously separated to form a unique combination attuned
to specifi c, immediate, and complex political challenges.
Rousseau did not seek to erase his own subjectivity when engaging schol-
arly debates. He did aspire to separate himself from the self-congratulatory
norms and values of his day, those uncritically celebrating enlightenment,
civilization, and freethinking. He did so by putting himself outside of his
time and place, framing himself as a barbarian through a combination of
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 25
identifi cation, will, and sheer assertion. From this location, he describes
himself as having experienced a (divine) revelation about the fundamental
relation of empire to inquiry: In short, those positioned in polities with
resources to undertake work in the arts and sciences were least able to pur-
sue them eff ectively. Th is extended more generally to colonial expansionary
voyages. Th ose poised for fi rsthand encounters with previously unknown
peoples, what Rousseau thought constituted radically unique opportunities
for human study, had no interest in them. With very diff erent driving pri-
orities, they were more concerned to rationalize their own often-imperious
actions. Still, as critical as he was of them, Rousseau was himself fascinated
by travel writings. He took from them profound instances of refusal; mo-
ments when narratives of the inevitable desirability of French models were
clearly and publicly rejected by people who faced being or already were
colonized. Still, Rousseau was not able to move (at this stage) beyond criti-
cal refusal. Trapped in a singular Christianized classical teleology, the fur-
ther one moved from originary moments, in this case ones that were only
basically social, the further one moved toward decay. Indeed, even in Social
Contract, Rousseau pins his greatest hopes on those places in which general
wills were still emergent. Nevertheless, out of his fascination with insistent
refusals to be assimilated into a single problematic norm and his valorizing
of what others called “backward” as a lens through which to delegitimate
unjust equalities, he cultivated a fruitful terrain in which many still profi t-
ably labor. Put diff erently, while he was not himself a creolized thinker in
the sense for which I will argue, he introduced ideas and orientations into
political refl ection that invite productive creolization by others.
As I will show in Chapter 2, Fanon, in both the opening of Black Skin,
White Masks and his life’s practice and research, asked if what are framed as
apolitical norms of specialized scientifi c research can ever be independent of
the colonial world from which they emerge and within which they function
as meaningful. For him, those interested in grasping human relations rather
than political norms and practices that compromised them needed to make
a question of method itself by demanding that work in the social sciences
advance the cause of liberation. His political writings therefore emerged out
of direct collective eff orts to restructure Algerian society “from the bottom
up.” In so doing, he off ered a portrait of how we might witness the emer-
gence and generalizing of a formerly squelched political will. Indispensably
aiding in its articulate forging was a critical orientation to the nature of
inquiry and of truth.
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26 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
paradoxes of imperial enlightenment
Rousseau’s life as the man who was subsequently canonized began with his
controversial refl ections on the moral value of work in the arts and sciences.
His rendition of the initial, transformative impetus that culminated in this
writing is frequently retold, often as “the illumination at Vincennes.” When
walking on a belligerently hot summer day to visit his then still close friend
and editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot, Rousseau stopped briefl y un-
der the shade of a tree.
Diderot had been imprisoned by royal edict with neither a trial nor
hearing for his irreverent Letters on the Blind. In it he had queried: If it is
true, as the Church claimed, that the existence of G-d is self-evident to all
who could through their eyes directly perceive the grandeur of the physical
world, could not the blind man, without such access, legitimately refuse to
believe?
Beneath the tree, Rousseau paged through an issue of France’s most infl u-
ential literary journal, Mercure de France, only to arrive upon the announce-
ment of an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. It asked for
answers (that could be read aloud from start to fi nish within thirty minutes)
to the question of “whether the restoration of the arts and sciences tended
to purify morals.” Rousseau described himself as having been thrown into
a fi t of reverie: Ideas streamed over him and, as if for the fi rst time, he ex-
perienced a piercing clarity. His response, known to contemporary readers
as his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences or simply First Discourse, off ered a
passionate and unremitting “no” that won him a fi rst prize and generated
three years of highly public, heated debate.
Leo Damrosch has observed, that it “is curious that this rather obscure
[Dijon] body of lawyers, physicians, and churchmen [among them, a hope-
less alcoholic and a former musketeer] should have launched a great career”
(2005, 215). Because the academy was only recently founded, bourgeois, and
provincial, its goings-on rarely made news in Paris (Cranston 1991, 233).
Furthermore, in what can be read as an affi rmation of the Discourse’s ar-
guments concerning the relationship between work that is rewarded and
that which is of enduring quality, the essay itself is generally considered by
later generations of scholars as one of Rousseau’s least signifi cant pieces of
writing. In Robert Wokler’s estimation, for instance, not only was the argu-
ment lacking in originality, much of its scholarship was also secondhand.
Although it would be excessive to frame it as plagiarism, as a 1766 text by
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 27
Dom Joseph Cajot in fact did, words and passages of his intellectual heroes
were more “recapitulated” than engaged constructively to build new argu-
ments (Wokler 2001, 29). Rousseau shared this negative assessment, calling
the work the weakest of his writings, defi cient in logic and order, balance
and harmony. Still, in it and in his exchanges with critics, one sees the fi rst
articulation of themes that he developed into what he called “the [true but
distressing] System” (CW 2:184) of his subsequent political thought. In
addition, and as important, the orientation he staked out as a writer and
thinker, which is our focus, was here inaugurated. It was, as I will explain
shortly, as someone whose position as an outsider was indispensable to cor-
rectly diagnosing his times.
Rousseau wrote appreciatively of the kind of question that the Academy
of Dijon had posed—one bound up with truths of human happiness rather
than scholastic subtleties that plagued every branch of learning—and made
clear that he anticipated that he would not easily be forgiven for what he
dared to say. Off ending all that was admired (including by some of his clos-
est friends and later collaborators), he announces his readiness for blame.
He is able to do so precisely because he claims that his primary aim is not to
please men of his century, country, or society. Th is distinguished him from
most of his contemporaries who sought to be freethinkers and philosophers.
Only seeking these ideals because they were fashionable, Rousseau swipes,
most men fell far short of them. If born two centuries before they would
have donned as quickly the mantle of Catholic fanatics tormenting dissent-
ing French Protestants. “Th ey care very little about the sciences,” he wrote,
“provided that they continue to place the learned in honor. It is like the
priests of paganism, who only supported religion as long as it made them
respected” (CW 2:198n).
While the negative position that Rousseau advanced in answer to the
Academy’s question was not novel—a less creatively realized version of it
was the conventional conservative response to many a new social develop-
ment and the position of the Dijon competition’s second prize winner—it
collided with the self-image of the moment with what Peter Gay (1987, 1)
described as an anachronistic moral sternness. At the same time, its sever-
ity was conveyed with lyrical abandon, wrought in phrases and metaphori-
cal fl ourish diffi cult to ignore and easy to quote (usually without reference
to qualifying context).
In addition, the work did not align itself with any easy or obvious al-
lies: Aristocratic interpreters read into its nostalgia an articulate assault on
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28 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
the bourgeois upstarts they resented. Diderot appreciated that its positive
examples were entirely pre-Christian (Cranston 1991, 234), while the Acad-
emy awarded what they thought gave voice to their deploring view of a
contagious secularism (Damrosch 2005, 215). Th e few people who Rousseau
praised unambiguously were those who could not and would not defend
or champion him. Th e stylized nations of the distant past, “savages” of the
Americas, and the few citizens in nations of Europe that labored largely un-
compensated—these were those peoples who he characterized as not valuing
the work involved in leaving written or scholarly records of themselves. So
busily involved with public life and social duties, their only legacy was in
memories of their deeds conveyed usually by word of mouth to interested
later generations.
However, Rousseau does not, as so many readers then and now surmised,
scorn learning in a celebration of intellectual or cultural primitivism. Indeed
the text begins with his emphasizing the beauty of human beings, through
resources of their reason, stepping outside of shadows, “travers[ing], like the
sun, the vast expanse of the universe with giant steps” (Rousseau 1987, 3).
He also, albeit briefl y and almost in conclusion, singles out for special con-
sideration a small group of men with rare intellectual gifts who, undeterred
by the absence of teachers or societal rewards, could not avoid investigating
the world around them. In his Second Discourse, to which I will soon turn,
Rousseau wished that men of this character and caliber had been poised
directly to observe the peoples encountered on European expansionary voy-
ages. Th ey, he wrote with resignation, would have made full use of this
completely unique opportunity for human study.
His brief list of examples included Verulam, Descartes, and Newton, men
satisfi ed to labor without compensation beyond the inherent value of un-
derstanding. Almost always self-educated—spared the kind of “schooling”
that imprinted the weaker mental habits of teachers on their students—
“these tutors of mankind had none themselves” (Rousseau 1987, 21). Spurred
on by obstacles intrinsic to inquiry, these men would “venture forth alone
in their footsteps and to overtake them” (ibid.). It was they who could raise
monuments to the glory of the human mind because doing so was not their
primary aim. Still, since souls imperceptibly proportion themselves to the
objects with which they are occupied, Rousseau argued that men of this
kind should not merely “occupy a chair at some university” or labor for a
modest pension from an academy. He asked pointedly, “Does anyone . . .
believe that their works would not [feel] the eff ects of their condition?”
F6183.indb 28F6183.indb 28 12/2/13 9:26:50 AM12/2/13 9:26:50 AM
Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 29
(ibid.). Th ey should instead be among kings’ counselors and given asylum
in courts, receiving the “recompense worth[y] of them” namely “of contrib-
uting by their infl uence to the happiness of the peoples to whom they have
taught wisdom” (ibid.). It is only then that we might see what could posi-
tively emerge from virtue, science, and authority working in collaboration.
Th e separation of political power from enlightenment and wisdom confi ned
learned men to the petty and princes to the less than noble with negative
consequences for all.
Th e diffi culty was that while the achievements of men like Descartes and
Newton could be attributed to their individual idiosyncrasies, their rarity
was instead the result of a larger paradoxical predicament that is the central
focus of Rousseau’s First Discourse: If arts and sciences, at their best, reveal
and illuminate the nature of human beings and their physical and social
world, this is hardest to do precisely where the conditions for such inquiry
are most developed. In amply resourced circumstances, often the city cen-
ters of large empires, Rousseau contended, wealth, luxury, and idleness had
nurtured and in turn been intensifi ed by an increased aff ectedness, by a
desire, at any cost, for people to please one another and gain mutual ap-
proval. Craving recognition and praise, informal and formal education were
primarily devoted to refi ning taste and manners formulaically to secure it.
In such heavily crafted circumstances, while behavior is almost com-
pletely predictable, it cannot be treated as revelatory: One can never know
whom or with what one really deals. Where social rules function so despoti-
cally, not only is it highly diffi cult to uncloak the nature of human beings,
few will “follow their own lights” in the way that real inquiry demands. If
the very situations that could support the arts and sciences therefore make
the dispositions necessary actually to engaging in them scarce, it is, by con-
trast, in those places that Rousseau characterizes with moral states to see
themselves and others where they are least likely to undertake such work.
Th e values and priorities that make such people coarser, more transparent
and independent, are the same ones that would discourage the sensibilities
that would appreciate devoting time to meticulous and documented study.
Th e implications? Th ose with the character necessary to engage meaning-
fully in artistic and scientifi c inquiry would esteem the activities and their
products the least.
Rousseau reminds readers who might wish to forget that the arts and sci-
ences or “enlightenment” had been absent in Europe—after all, the question
of the essay contest was formulated uncontroversially as the “restoration”
F6183.indb 29F6183.indb 29 12/2/13 9:26:51 AM12/2/13 9:26:51 AM
30 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
rather than, say, “development” or “fl ourishing” of arts and sciences. What
are now considered intellectual centers only centuries before lived in a state
“worse than . . . even more contemptible than ignorance” (Rousseau 1987,
3). In a classically Rousseauian simultaneous recognition of indebtedness to
often denied corners of the world while inverting more conventional orders
of value, he writes that it was the fall of Constantinople that introduced
through Italy into Europe works from the classical age. Th is brought about
nothing less than a revolution set in motion “from the least expected corner,”
from the “stupid Moslem, the eternal scourge of letters, who caused them to
be reborn among us” (ibid.). Th is formulation in fact rearticulates a highly
misleading European myth: For the arts and sciences to be “reclaimed” in
Western Europe, it had anachronistically to be cast as part of a geography
that united it with the Mediterranean world, with Greece and Rome and
Italy, a way of conceiving of geopolitical relations that only emerged later.
A more accurate formulation would have asked about the “introduction” of
the arts and sciences into Europe’s northern and western reaches. Either
way, the appearance of this “debris of ancient Greece” (ibid.) stimulated
not only work in letters and then sciences, according to Rousseau, but a
larger and more radical social transformation. Th e arts and sciences could
not alone be blamed for such developments, but they did off er one of the
clearest indices of what Rousseau considered the resulting depravity: Indeed
he insisted that their perfection could be measured in direct proportion with
the corruption of the vigor and health of souls.
Rousseau portrays two diff erent possible trajectories: Th e fi rst is of places
where the arts and sciences are highly developed. Th ey appear and would be
mistaken by foreigners as replete with virtue. He laments, if only decency
were the same as virtue, if offi cial maxims were lived as rules, “if true philos-
ophy were inseparable from the title of philosopher” (Rousseau 1987, 4). In
fact what such polities have perfected is the cultivation of taste and politesse,
of making the art of pleasing into repressive rules that cast minds into a uni-
form mold, transforming society into a herd. By such measures, by which
one “no longer dares to seem what one really is” (ibid.), eighteenth-century
France no doubt surpassed any historical or present competitors. In cultures
of contrived outward appearances, however, there is much uncertainty and
little well-founded friendship, esteem, or confi dence. Finery in all its variet-
ies is, after all, an art, but one that in fact cloaks deformities and weaknesses
that a strong and vigorous body and soul would neither need nor desire.
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 31
Signifi cant examples of this alternative include what typically are consid-
ered the greatest of empires: from “the fi rst school of the universe,” Egypt,
to Greece, Rome, “Arabs, and fi nally Turks” (Rousseau 1987, 5), all places
and peoples that beginning as humble shepherds, fi eldworkers, or laborers
illustrated that mores and virtues dissolved as wealth and arts progressed.
(Th eir vigor had manifested itself as martial virtue through which territories
had expanded and with them a reliance on other people that enabled them
to become slack.) One cannot, Rousseau emphasized, have the arts and sci-
ences where people do not treat what is done with time lightly. Th is was al-
ready a sign of danger. Writes Rousseau, “In politics, as in moral philosophy,
it is a great evil not to do good, and every useless citizen may be viewed as a
pernicious man” (12). Not only did such undertakings accelerate a turning
from social and political duties to more self-directed and idle uses of hours,
days, and weeks, it also required and then buttressed a concern to become
rich at any cost. Politicians, who enunciate what is publicly esteemed in
such societies, would speak only of commerce and money, estimating the
value of their populace not according to their productive contributions but
in terms of how much they could and would consume. Such men misled
one another into mistaking luxury for the outward and indisputable sign of
the brilliance of their empires, even though obsessions with it were likely to
shorten and morally impoverish their reign.
Rich monarchies had historically been conquered by bands of men who,
in economic terms, were humble and poor. Some such nations had delib-
erately avoided the trajectory toward empire and decadent decay. Seemingly
more coarse, with less aff ected manners and language, their actual characters
and relations with one another were not concealed by ornamentation. Remi-
niscent of Hannah Arendt’s (1958) later distinctions among labor, work, and
action: rather than leaving the remains of elegant buildings and eloquent
written language, works designed to last forever, their lives were those of
labor and their legacies of heroic and glorious political action, worthy of be-
ing recorded in the memories of their descendants. As examples, Rousseau
names the Scythians, Germans, and early Romans. In a note he mentions
those of whom he claims not to dare speak, the “happy nations which do
not know even by name the vices we have so much trouble repressing, those
savages in America whose simple and natural polity Montaigne unhesitat-
ingly prefers not only to Plato’s Laws but even to everything philosophy
could ever imagine as most perfect for the government of peoples” (Rous-
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32 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
seau 1987, 7n17). Rousseau writes that Montaigne includes examples that
many would not know how to admire. “ ‘What!’ he says, ‘why they don’t
wear pants!’ ”
Th e Scythians, Germans, early Romans, and natural polities of “the sav-
ages” if not identical with, remained closer to an image against which Rous-
seau posits the decadent present which he urges his readers to recall: “of
the simplicity of earliest times,” “a beautiful shore, adorned by the hands
of nature alone, toward which one continually turns one’s eyes, and from
which one regretfully feels oneself moving away” (1987, 15). While “innocent
and virtuous men” were content to have “the gods as witnesses of their ac-
tions, they lived together in the same huts” (ibid.). It was when they sought
to banish these “inconvenient spectators,” that they either moved into what
had been their prior residences or made their own homes indistinguishable
from former temples.
It is not trivial that from Egypt to Greece stories emerged that cast a god
antagonistic to human tranquility as the inventor of sciences, as the one
that indulged the “vain curiosity” in people. Moreover, it is with reason
that nature shrouded her operations with a heavy veil (as a mother wrests
scissors from the hand of a clumsy child). Against the more noble “idea
that one wants to form of it” and although it mortifi es men to say so, the
origins of human knowledge were in superstition, ambition, and avarice—
from pride—and its objects were often also our defects—jurisprudence as-
sumes the existence of injustice; history devotes itself to tyrants, wars, and
conspirators. In other words, most people seek what become the sciences
and arts for self-interested, vain motives and naturalize some of the greatest
weaknesses and faults of human beings in their institutionalization. One
cannot easily affi rm that the very best of the learned produce much that is
useful or that what are considered sublime discoveries—whether the ratios
in which bodies attract each other in a vacuum or understandings of which
stars can be inhabited or how insects reproduce—have made communities
better governed. What then of the many others “who to no purpose devour
the substance of the state” (Rousseau 1987, 12)?
Th e vast majority of people who pursue the arts and sciences have no
talent for or intrinsic interest in them. Instead what motivates most art-
ists, whom Rousseau assumed would be male, is fi rst and foremost praise,
particularly in the form of female attention. Th e quality of their work and
its aims are therefore entirely determined by what promises to elicit it. Few
therefore even aspire to create work that would outlive them. Th e small
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 33
number who do, in their own day, die in oblivion. For the same luxury that
inclines us to live wholly in the opinions of others also erodes the ability to
say that, however popular something might be, that it is, in fact, banal or
crude, untrue or ugly.
Men who engage in the arts and sciences desperate for gaining distinction
go to any length to make a name for themselves, often through callous, ill-
reasoned, and contemptuous attitudes toward homeland and religion that
they hope will make them appear clever or witty. Such work is also neces-
sarily primarily sedentary and as many other occupations without physical
exertion, weakens military virtues by enervating the vigor of the soul and
the body. How could men crushed by small needs and pains, face extreme
hunger, thirst, danger, and fatigue? Rather than practicing virtue, men be-
come content to study it.
Th e greatest expense and most severe consequence of fl ourishing arts and
sciences, however, is the culture of ill-distributed glory that is ultimately
antipolitical. In other words, people are rewarded for being talented rather
than virtuous; eloquent rather than useful; pleasant rather than good. Wise
men who might have had their virtue enlivened and made advantageous to
society, therefore instead allow it to languish with the result that one has
societies with specialists of all varieties, whether chemists or painters, but
no citizens. Th e few who remain live in the abandoned countryside, indi-
gent and despised, producing bread and milk, daily sustenance, for others.
Th e vast majority of people who would not be great sculptors or geometers
might be highly useful in another more civically necessary occupation. En-
visaging and accepting this alternative would be possible if they did not see
it as a demotion, if they could be content with their own self-esteem and
self-worth (rather than envying the glory of immortalized writers and think-
ers). Satisfi ed with what Rousseau calls the “true philosophy” of aiming to
act well, they could thereby spare state monies and make more politically
relevant use of their precious time.
Rousseau momentarily entertained the critical suggestion that luxury
might be necessary to provide bread for the poor, but he ultimately con-
cluded that luxuries and poor people were produced together: the luxury
that feeds a hundred poor people in the cities simultaneously allows a hun-
dred thousand to die in the countryside; the money handed by the rich to
various artists for what is superfl uous is thereby not available for farmers
to subsist. “And the latter has no clothes precisely because the former have
braids on theirs . . . Gravy is necessary for our cooking; that is why so many
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34 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
sick people lack broth” (CW 2:116, asterisked note one). In claiming that the
very meaning of luxury is zero-sum, that it is exactly to have what others
lack in necessarily exclusive forms of conspicuous consumption, Rousseau
frames himself as saying what is both true and indecent. His remarks were,
he commented, tempered only by the constraints of language. He writes,
“My adversaries are most fortunate that the culpable delicacy of our lan-
guage prevents me from off ering details that would make them blush for the
cause they dare defend” (ibid.).
Rousseau later would modify his account of imperial decay, acknowledg-
ing that it was fl awed political decisions rather than the fl ourishing of the
arts and sciences that caused ruin; that the degeneration of mores was in-
stead the outcome of multiple factors including climate, custom, tempera-
ment, governance, and law; that the presence of the arts and sciences was in
fact a corollary rather than singularly decisive of a more fundamental path
toward degrading decadence. It was in fact out of inequalities introduced
through the creation and normalization of private property that wealth ac-
cumulated with relations based in dissimulation, dishonesty, opacity, and
deceit between rich and poor, masters and slaves. But at this earlier mo-
ment, Rousseau insisted that imperial wealth, luxury, and idleness emerge
together, developing and developed by the arts and sciences (CW 2:48).
Although these forms of inquiry and expression were less despotic, they
were ultimately more powerful than both government and law: Rather than
limiting the body, they captured the mind and imagination, leading us to
embrace the curbing of our liberty as the condition of being civilized.
Less developed but as pertinent is another challenge made visible by
Rousseau’s admonitions about the (ultimately unbridgeable) gap between
appearance and actuality. Namely, in associating behavioral conformity with
societal wealth and decadence, Rousseau raises questions about cause and
eff ect: If sciences, arts, and letters can only emerge in places wealthy enough
to indulge their vices—among them an obsession with being pleasing that
can be produced through formal and informal education—is what is stud-
ied as the “human nature” of individuals and larger collectivities in fact only
a byproduct of one brand of societal development? Is the predictability that
the social sciences seek and claim to illuminate in fact produced by the same
condition that enabled it to be studied?
To the question of the relationship of behavior to social conditions for
study, Rousseau adds that of empire to inquiry. While one does not, even
in Rousseau’s account, need imperial resources to investigate the world—he
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 35
describes himself, when in isolation, naturally wanting to refl ect and again
there are the largely uncompensated men who should undertake work in
the arts and sciences—“centers of learning,” as opposed to individuals and
small groups engaged in scholarly or intellectual endeavors, have histori-
cally emerged within empires. First through extraction and then through
the requirement of training teams of bureaucrats to administer the impe-
rial domain, empires then through their sheer magnitude and weight, like
the sun, draw everything toward and into them. Many great minds, often
from the peripheries of such terrains (and, in Rousseau’s account, raised in
environments marked less by the pathologies here described), fl ocked to
them in search of kindred spirits and economies that could sustain their
creative endeavors. Writing that they and others produced could thereby
be published and kept in print across multiple generations precisely because
of their inclusion within one centralized collection. Th is does, as Fanon
would make explicit, raise the question of whether most of what would be
celebrated under the name of the pursuit of truth (rather than shunned as
heresy, propaganda, or ideology), would not already be implicated in the
process of legitimating the societies from which the conclusions emanated.
At the same time, imperial societies are highly complex and internally varie-
gated: Resources and “idle time” can be put to an array of uses, not all self-
serving. Still, Rousseau would insist that it was a rare few that could remain
focused on purposeful projects driven by their own questions, inured to
pressures to please by remaining suffi ciently trendy or audacious to hold an
ever-fl eeting public eye.
Rousseau’s adversaries also raised more particular challenges to the para-
doxical predicament he had portrayed. In particular, had Rousseau not been
uncharitable in his depiction of scientists and artists? Were not these men the
few who lived with alternative values, often choosing moderate lives, books,
and opportunities to study over riches and ornamentation? Had Rousseau
mistaken their patrons, the idle rich who profi ted from their industry, for
artists themselves? Were scientifi c experiments not a substitute for the idle-
ness he scorned? Why was he so willing to reduce men to admiring stupidly,
rather than exploring, nature? Did not the cultivation of sciences lead so-
cieties to fl ourish through expanding the work of artisans, easing the labor
of farmers, and creating roles for physicians and jurists? Were not the fruits
of such work more ambivalent and ambiguous, producing evils and some of
their remedies? In failing to achieve their intellectual objectives, had not
some produced useful, even important, mistakes?
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36 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
Rousseau never fully addressed all such challenges. He maintained, for
instance, that many poor philosophers were angry that they lacked wealth
and still devoted time to idle priorities. Most artists, he insisted, were nei-
ther simple nor modest. It was, after all, impossible for cultures of deca-
dence and luxury not to aff ect all within their orbit, if in divergent ways.
But these important considerations ultimately remained secondary to the
primary epiphany that struck Rousseau on his way to Vincennes. It had
everything to do with the irreverent questions that had landed Diderot in
prison: could the blind, by virtue of their blindness, legitimately perceive
the world in radically diff erent terms, ones that provided suffi cient grounds
for refuting the greatness of G-d? Rousseau himself sought no such refuta-
tion, but asked in a secularized version, what happened to ultimate sources
of authority and legitimation, to the societally sacred, if one framed value
in profoundly diff erent lights? Would seemingly self-evident grandeur dim?
Th e answer seemed to be yes.
temporal paradoxes
While Rousseau insisted on the radical unity of the human species—that
visible diff erences soon called “racial” or “national” were the product of a
range of contingent circumstances—he was fascinated by our internal varia-
tion. He saw it less as instances of distinctive “cultures,” however, than as
an array of particular moments that one might arrange along a teleological
trajectory from multifaceted health and vigor toward decadent dependence
and loss. It was typically assumed that it was only those farther along these
developmental paths who were poised to assess all that came before, all that
“they” had moved through and transcended. Rousseau, however, inverts
these relations, suggesting that it was instead from the position of earlier
points that one could critically evaluate, implicitly or explicitly, what were
framed as the unqualifi ed and inevitable goods of advanced civilizations. It
was in allying himself with these earlier locations—through identifi cation,
willing, and mere assertion—that he could put himself at odds with his own
time and place. Th is, he suggested, enabled him uniquely to think with an
independence that could well lead to conclusions that would not be pleasing
to others. It was only through such a break that he could correctly diagnose
his day, seeing anew its self-congratulatory self-ascription as enlightened.
When Th omas Hobbes had introduced his astonishing Leviathan (in 1651
at the age of 63), he off ered a brief statement about the nature of wisdom
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 37
and how to ascertain the credibility of the political insights he was outlin-
ing. Repeating what was frequently stated in his own day, he affi rmed that
one does not become wise through reading books but by reading men. Th is
was a more diffi cult feat than was commonly assumed, however: It was not
enough to observe those around one and to show one’s “wisdom” in dis-
paraging them. Instead it was best achieved by taking pains to read oneself.
Hobbes emphasized that he was not here echoing the challenging way that
“reading oneself ” was usually invoked—by emboldened men to their social
and political “betters”—but by studying one’s own thoughts, emotions and
passions in a range of circumstances to gauge the reactions of others in
similar and slightly modifi ed predicaments. Doing so could enable one re-
ally to know one’s few acquaintances. Th e task of those who governed far
exceeded this, of course: they needed to read nothing short of humankind.
Hobbes hoped that his treatise would lessen the burden: All the governing
leader need do was see if he did not recognize himself in what Hobbes had
written. If he did, this was the surest (in fact, only) demonstration for such
a doctrine. Hobbes therefore assumed the radical predictability of human
passions within and outside of constituted political orders, his having access
to them, and that drawn sharply (even if the objects to which they attached
varied with the particularities of individuals and their schooling), all would
recognize their natures in his shared mirror. Although he wrote to all, he
framed his treatise as directed to those at the reigns of political power, dis-
tancing himself from those that might challenge them.
Rousseau establishes his authorial authority in the First Discourse rather
diff erently. Locating himself deliberately and emphatically as an outsider
of both his space and day, he suggests that the fundamental constitution
of men can be suffi ciently diff erent across political time to make men of
separate moments largely incomprehensible to one another. His role as a
thinker is to understand and make available through his writing the internal
life of these varied instantiations of human being. Th e number of approving
readers could not ascertain the credibility of his insights, however. In his
“Letter to Grimm” (of 1751) he wrote, “I want in vain to make him under-
stand that a single witness in my favor is decisive, whereas a hundred wit-
nesses prove nothing against my sentiment, because the witnesses are parties
in the trial” (CW 2:85).
It was the convention of his day not to include one’s name on a title
page. Rousseau followed this norm, only to break with it, identifying the
author, himself, as “a citizen of Geneva” and by an epigraph from Ovid’s
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38 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
Tristia, “Here I am the barbarian because they do not understand me.”
In fact, Rousseau lacked technical grounds for the former claim since he
had renounced the Reformed religion in his conversion to Catholicism in
1728 (Cranston 1982, 236). In addition, as Starobinski (1988, 337) has em-
phasized, Rousseau’s form of identifi cation made him “doubly a rebel” as
“the myth of Geneva through which he attacked France became reason for
dissatisfaction with Genevan reality.” Still enabling Rousseau to speak from
the position of foreigner with erstwhile loyalties, he emphasized, in a period
antagonistic to it, both a desire for rootedness and certainty that the loca-
tion from which one wrote really mattered. Unlike many who sought to
make the particular place from which they thought irrelevant, he insisted
on its determining eff ect on what he could and would not say. Rousseau
would later, in a similar spirit, praise the Poles for being Poles, unlike the
French, English, and Germans who he thought in becoming increasingly
European could be “at home” anywhere that could satisfy their bourgeois
preferences. Here this performance of particular patriotism, of love of one
country rather than of the world, would only have seemed anachronistic to
his cosmopolitan contemporaries.
Compounding his loud allegiance to a specifi c, nonlocal place, was Rous-
seau’s announcement that he and the content of the essay would be taken
for coarse, uncivilized, and primitive. To be backward (in the way of the
barbarian), for Rousseau, however, was an achievement: It was to have cir-
cumvented being molded by the repressive civility sacred to and enshroud-
ing his times. In his “Preface to Narcissus,” he proudly wrote, “in spite of
the politeness of my century, I am as crude as the Macedonians of Philip”
(CW 2:187n1); to Grimm, he insisted, as if it were necessary and clarifying,
that being a barbarian and a criminal were “two completely diff erent things”
(85). Th ese very features that made him abhorrent were those that enabled
him to see through deceptive masks, to diagnose our actual conditions. He
refl ected, “We fi nally come to modern peoples, and I am careful not to fol-
low the reasonings that are judged to be appropriate on this subject” (124).
He later described himself as “not made like anyone” else he had ever met, a
condition that he deplored and desired, that was his misfortune and great-
est source of pride (Confessions, opening paragraph; Starobinski 1988, 124).
Here, in an early public introduction, being an unsynchronized anomaly
was an essential virtue, one through which he would reveal what were not
mere epistemological concerns, but moral ones as well (4).
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 39
If a desirable future is understood in the singular, assuming that break-
ing with what is most easily accepted is indispensable to fresh thought and
seeking truth by studiously avoiding eff orts to gain public approval, would
seem to require moving backwards. Th e only positive alternative to being
contemporary therefore was to be of a prior moment not in historical time
but in Rousseau’s philosophy of history or developmental philosophical an-
thropology. Rousseau makes very clear in his exchanges with his critics and
in subsequent writings, that his are not exercises in history but in theoreti-
cal, exploratory, or genealogical reasoning divided into a decadent present
and a period before its emergence that, in lucky and exceptional instances,
was extended into a period coterminus with the now of Western Europe.
From this vantage point, Scythians and early Romans are preferable to their
imperial counterparts. Within his contemporary Europe, prized for their
nobility are the poor who remain civic-minded, whether in their capacity to
fi ght for a homeland or to supply it with food. In other words, Rousseau
could circumvent the paradox that he had identifi ed, doing justice to the
question of the eff ects of the arts and sciences precisely because he was not
a “man of his century” but instead, if only through willful identifi cation,
rooted in a previous period of humankind either now lost or facing threats
of extinction.
One would be struck by Rousseau’s references to “the savages of America”
had he not introduced his own authority as tied up precisely with being
considered a barbarian—the term used by many early modern Spaniards for
people who could legitimately be conquered in the Americas. It was as such
that he thought he could uniquely admire the striking examples of these
newly encountered societies, examples, he thought, of “true philosophy”
and the enactment rather than mere study of virtue. He commented in his
“Preface to Narcissus”:
I notice that there now reigns in the world a multitude of petty maxims
that seduce the simple by false appearance of philosophy, and which,
besides that, are very convenient for ending disputes with an important
and decisive tone without any need for examining the question. Such is
this one: “Everywhere men have the same passions: everywhere amour-
propre and self-interest lead them; therefore everywhere they are the
same.” When Geometers have made an assumption that from reasoning
to reasoning leads them to an absurdity, they go back on their steps and
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40 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
thus demonstrate the assumption to be false. Th e same method, applied
to the maxim in question, would easily show its absurdity: but let us
reason diff erently.
He then turned to the question of the relative merits of “savage” and “Eu-
ropean” man:
Among the Savages, personal interest speaks as strongly as among us,
but it doesn’t say the same things: love of society and the care for their
common defense are the only bonds that unite them: this word of
property which costs so many crimes to our honest people, has almost
no sense among them: among them they have no discussions about
interests that divide them; nothing carries them to deceive one another;
public esteem is the only good to which each aspires, and which they all
deserve. It is very possible for a Savage to commit a bad action, but it
is not possible that he take on the habit of doing evil, for that wouldn’t
be of any good for him. I believe that one can make a very just estima-
tion of men’s morals by the multitude of business they have among each
other: the more commerce they have together, the more they admire
their talents and industry, the more they trick each other decently and
adroitly, and the more they are worthy of contempt. I say this with
regret; the good man is the one who does not need to fool anyone, and
the Savage is that man. (CW 2:194n)
Challenged by one commentator that there was no place in time or space
where a group of people had achieved perfection—that the need for such an
imaginary instance was a delusion rooted in Rousseau’s envy and maladjust-
ment—the critic advanced that if there were times without certain crimes
there would have been other disorders. Without gold and ambition there
might be both fewer crimes and fewer virtues. For every one simpler society
that might be more equitable there were hundreds of others that were venge-
ful and superstitious (CW 2:125). Rousseau replied that he needed only one
example and that “a virtuous people cultivating the sciences has never been
seen” (ibid.). All learned nations, without exception, had lost love and
practice of glory and virtue. When a critic suggested that America “does
not off er spectacles less shameful for the human species,” Rousseau retorted,
“Especially since Europeans have been there.”
Disputing the view, found in Aristotle’s discussion of the enslavement
following war, that the ability to vanquish people cannot but imply some
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 41
superiority of the conquerors, Rousseau suggested that technological sophis-
tication evident in warfare and moral improvement were not only not syn-
onymous but also in fact opposed. He asked:
What were we, then, I ask you, when we made the conquest of America
that is so greatly admired? Will I be told that the event indicates the
valor of the Conquerors? It indicates only their ruse and their skill. It
indicates that an adroit and subtle man can obtain by his industry the
success that a brave man expects only from his valor. Let’s talk without
partiality. Whom shall we judge to be more courageous: the odious Cor-
tez subjugating Mexico by means of gun powder, perfi dy, and betrayals,
or unfortunate Guatimozin stretched out on burning coals by decent
Europeans for his treasures, scolding one of his Offi cers from whom the
same treatment evoked some moans, and saying to him proudly: and I,
am I on roses? (CW 2:125)
Still, Rousseau fl atly rejected the depiction of his First Discourse as an
anti-intellectual expression of a desire forcibly to move history backward.
Against the accusation by Gautier that he sought to burn down libraries,
abolish all cultural institutions, and reduce men to being satisfi ed with bare
necessities (CW 2:128–29), Rousseau distinguished between forms of igno-
rance and the role of institutions in polities not or already corrupted. He
explained that he had, from the outset, separated ignorance that reduces
human beings to beasts—the exit from which he celebrated—from that
through which we might restrain our curiosity in modesty appropriate to
our limited faculties. Science was not intrinsically evil, he repeated. It is we,
human beings, who have meager capacities to make good use of it. While we
might acquire a share of supreme intelligence, we tend to mistake our “vain
and deceitful knowledge for the sovereign intelligence which sees the truth
of everything at a glance” (190–91).
Having already failed to contain the consequences, however, there was no
easy solution: Suddenly to remove academic institutions in already corrupted
Europe would do no good—fully developed, their immediate disappear-
ance would plummet the society into further decay. Once having strayed, a
people do not return to virtue short of a great revolution which one should
not desire and could not foresee (CW 2:53). In such circumstances, as with
medicine for an already dependent body, arts and sciences might function as
a palliative: as giving food to tigers so they don’t devour the children. After
having “hatched the vices,” arts and sciences cover them with a varnish that
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42 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
does not permit the poison to fi nd a vent so freely (196). Rousseau’s aim,
however, had never been to off er remedies; proposing policy, he stated un-
abashedly, was for those bolder than he (129). Having “discovered” an evil,
he had only sought to illuminate it in a spirit consistent with his preference
for being a man of paradoxes rather than one of prejudices.
paradoxes of savagery
In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (hereafter his Second Discourse),
Rousseau modifi ed and extended the charges of his preliminary writings in
his critical refl ection on the meaning of European expansionary voyages.
From his vantage point, for all of the havoc and terror that such imperial
odysseys wrought, they did, as W. E. B. Du Bois would say of the creation of
an African-American population through institutions of enslavement, create
radically unique opportunities for human study—a clarifying mirror into
the nature of the human species through studying it in the fullest range of
predicaments. Instead of encounters of open-ended inquiry, however, what
travel practices and writings revealed, in his view, were nothing more than
eff orts to shore up a priori models and commitments most compatible with
rationalizing colonial and evangelizing projects. Perhaps to the point of ex-
aggeration, Rousseau highlighted against these, several instances of “savage”
people from the northern and southern most reaches of the globe and from
the Caribbean who explicitly rejected what various Europeans off ered. What
was rebuff ed in Rousseau’s view was nothing less than the desirability of the
triumph of these models of civilization. What one witnessed more than “sav-
ages” clamoring to become European were individual Europeans who, if not
stopping to craft the quality written records Rousseau sought, left the impli-
cations of their actions: they broke with the ventures that had brought them,
wishing to leave the decadence of the continent behind by “going native.”
Qualifying his earlier undialectical position on the nature of progress and
artistic and scientifi c endeavor, Rousseau observed “how the burning desire
to [be] talked about, the yearning for distinction, which nearly always keeps
us outside ourselves, is responsible for what is best and worst among men,
responsible for our virtues and our vices, for our sciences and our mistakes,
for our conquerors and our philosophers; responsible, in short, for a mul-
titude of bad things and a very few good ones” (OC 3:188–89). Th is assess-
ment fundamentally colored the story of the emergence of human beings
that he outlined in his Second Discourse.
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 43
Now emphasizing that the most useful and least advanced of human
knowledge was that of man, he asked how we could understand inequality
without knowing human beings themselves. Already obsessed with the ques-
tion of inequality, observes Cranston (1982, 293), exploring the “origins” of
phenomena was a method of inquiry that attracted him. He began by cau-
tioning his readers: “O man, whatever may be your country, and whatever
opinions you may hold, listen to me: Here is your history as I believe I have
read it, not in books by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, who
never lies. Everything that comes from her will be true; if there is falsehood,
it will be mine, added unintentionally” (Rousseau CW 3:19). It is worth em-
phasizing that in authoring a history of the species, Rousseau here implies
and elsewhere made explicit, that he accepted the monogenetic account of
evolution rather than the far more widely supported polygenetic theories
of many of his contemporaries (CW 3; Duchet 1971, 21; During 1994, 52).
In other words, while many writers insisted and urgently sought data to
cement claims that human communities emerged from multiple points of
origin, from distinct constellations of ancestors in separate portions of the
globe, Rousseau supported the view that the full range of human beings all
must be originally linked to the same small community of early human be-
ings. Rather than innate discrepancies in their potential capacities, observ-
able diff erences, including traits most associated with racial diff erence, had
external, environmental causes and could, therefore, be altered.
What Rousseau sought through discerning a nature of man, which unlike
individual men, including himself, could never lie was to reveal what befi t-
ted human beings or both what we deserve and should not tolerate. In so
doing, he went even further back than the historical examples of his earlier
writings. Daring “to strip [man’s nature] naked, to follow the progress of
those times and things which have disfi gured it,” he compared “the man of
man with natural man” to show that our supposed perfecting was the true
source of our miseries” (CW 5:326). Th rough it, he sought an independent
point of view from which critically to explore his own times—to assure
that the scope of his imagination, of his perception of the possible, was not
circumscribed. Th is demanded understanding a state that no longer existed
and that perhaps had never been.
Rousseau famously charged that other social contract theorists, who had
also examined the foundations of society, had failed to reach them. “Speak-
ing continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, [they] trans-
ferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. Th ey spoke
F6183.indb 43F6183.indb 43 12/2/13 9:26:51 AM12/2/13 9:26:51 AM
44 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
about savage man, and it was civil man they depicted” (Rousseau 1987,
38). But these failures were symptomatic of the paradoxes at the core of
the under taking itself. Rousseau refl ected, here echoing the First Discourse,
“[since] all progress of the human species moves away from its primitive
state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive our-
selves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Th us,
in a sense, it is by dint of studying man that we have rendered ourselves
incapable of knowing him” (33). To achieve where others had failed, of dis-
tinguishing what was original from the artifi cial in the known instances of
humankind, most essentially required clarifying what constituted relevant
questions and problems rather than rushing prematurely to resolve them.
He stated: “Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do
not aff ect the question. Th e Researches which can be undertaken concerning
this Subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypotheti-
cal and conditional reasoning better suited to clarify the Nature of things
than to show their genuine origin, like those our Physicists make every day
concerning the formation of the World” (CW 3:19). For Rousseau, address-
ing what it means to be a human being cannot be done through recourse
only to facts all of which are gathered with reference to guiding hypotheses
that may themselves be deeply fl awed. He would soon after write of Grotius,
who denied that human power was established for the sake of the governed,
that “his most persistent model of reasoning is always to establish right by
fact [with the eff ect that research on public right is often a history of ancient
abuses]. One could use a more consistent method, but not one more favor-
able to Tyrants” (CW 4:132).
To get to the root of what we are therefore required a diff erent kind of
exercise, one in which we imagine how we became what we are through
postulating the absence of our conditions of possibility, in this case of estab-
lished, complex human societies. Jean Starobinksi describes this pursuit of
self-knowledge as an act of reminiscence: the “history” that Rousseau (1988,
19) recounts is an interior distance that we must travel toward other incanta-
tions of the self. Although Rousseau, much like Hobbes and Locke, oscil-
lates between using the state of nature as a theoretical device and suggesting
that it was an empirical place or moment—with Hobbes asking if what he
described as natural was not affi rmed for the doubtful by the practice of
travelers arming themselves and people locking doors before going to sleep,
by the Americas contemporary to him, recent examples of civil war, and on-
going international relations; Locke also pointed to the America of his day
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 45
as an example of a place in which land was not yet enclosed and still held in
common for the industrious and rational legitimately to seize through culti-
vation—Rousseau emphasized that the state of nature was theoretically and
structurally necessary for his argument, indispensable, as Emile Durkheim
(1960) later explained, to accurate notions through which properly to judge
our present state. Rousseau therefore off ered a portrait of a world without
sociality, of pre- or asocial creatures, with nothing but sporadic contact with
other proto-human beings.
Rousseau describes an original state of nature in which largely self-
suffi cient and solitary people of strong and undomesticated physical con-
stitutions had easily satiated needs. Without industry or fi xed dwellings,
they had ample leisure time, were completely absorbed in the present, and
at home in themselves and the world. Over time, changes in the physi-
cal environment produced semipermanent living arrangements and small
bands that together took on characteristic features due to shared foods and
climates. In these rudimentary associations, small groups began together to
procure conveniences for themselves. With these emerged the earliest in-
stances of conjugal love, primitive conceptions of possession, and a gentler
iteration of human being. Th ose so transformed possessed no corresponding
awareness that in each minor step away from total independence was an in-
born trajectory toward the softening of body and mind and a multiplication
of “needs” that could only lead to potentially servile reliance on others.
Although emphasizing the problem of discerning the origin of language, or
untying the knot of the formative relationship of speech to society, Rousseau
ultimately describes the elaboration of speech as introduced by occupants of
islands (which had been more densely and predictably populated for a lon-
ger time) into mainland collections of individuals. Without these expanded
resources, Rousseau suggests, there had been some primitive thinking, but
general ideas only occurred to minds with abstract terms with which to
articulate them.
Once social and conceptual relationships had emerged, people—instead
of making only crude, instrumental, and strategic comparisons between
themselves and other nonhuman animals—began to estimate their relative
value or how they compared with one another. Th is in turn nurtured an
increasingly self-centered vanity that made siblings of shame and envy. Each
wanted the public esteem that accrued to the physically strong or to the
beautiful, to the gifted singers or the adroit. Each claimed an entitlement to
this high regard and sought its assurance through the institution and polic-
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46 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
ing of shared rules of civility. Th ese expressed a new sentiment: far worse
than any physical injury was the harm of being held in contempt. Eff orts to
avoid negative appraisals drove a larger wedge between being and seeming,
pressures to feign desirable attributes that one lacked, in ways that, for Rous-
seau, further broadened capacities for manipulated and opaque relations.
Suffi ciently touched by society, these men and women were no longer
what they had been in “true youth of the world.” All of what had been un-
necessary and therefore latent natural intellectual and emotive capacities
were now fully active: Th ey possessed the faculties of memory and imagina-
tion, active reason, and the ability to pursue their own egocentric interests.
Exemplifying a unique developmental possibility that singled them and the
meaning of their freedom out from all other nonhuman animals, human
beings exemplifi ed the faculty of self-perfection. Indeed the driving point of
Rousseau’s exploration is that what might be perceived as the perfecting of
man could, from another vantage point, be considered his degeneration—
the cause of all of his misfortunes; that which gave rise to errors through
which he became a tyrant over himself and nature (1987, 45).
Th e basic equality of these nascent stages of society eroded, in Rousseau’s
account, with the emergence of conditions that made natural inequalities
consequential. With the dividing and cultivating of land for agriculture,
the discovery and uneven use of iron, and the introduction, normalization,
and consolidation of private property (through it feelings of possession of
family and huts extended into those of land), Rousseau wrote, “Vast forests
were transformed into smiling fi elds which had to be watered with men’s
sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and
grow with the crops” (CW 3:49). Some came to depend upon the exertion
of multiple others and minor diff erences in physical endowments of one
generation—of how quickly or extensively one could labor—compounded,
over-determining the fate of their descendants.
What was essential for Rousseau was less the fact of inequalities and dis-
parities of wealth as the relationships among people that they inevitably
produced. Most, argued Rousseau at the end of his Second Discourse, would
have to ingratiate themselves to others who would denigrate them precisely
because they relied on their labor. Cunning, self-deception, avarice, and cul-
tures of violence would become normal behavior, and the ability to perceive
the shared conditions of collective thriving, the core of public-spiritedness,
would corrode. In antagonistic relations that were eff ectively a perpetual
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 47
state of potential war and unhappiness, each individual saw in others only
limitations to their own enrichment.
On the brink of ruin, the rich felt that this situation was particularly
disadvantageous to them—that all that they had acquired by force could be
removed through the same means. Bereft of justifi ed reasons and means by
which to defend themselves individually, they “conceived,” Rousseau writes,
“the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind” (1987,
69). Th ey aimed to use the strength of those who might attack them, by
transforming these adversaries into their advocates through instilling max-
ims in the creation of political institutions that could secure what claims to
natural right could not (ibid.). One rich man made vivid the horror of his
own situation to his neighbor, who similarly held possessions that were as
burdensome as his needs, demonstrating that safety could be found neither
in wealth nor poverty. He urged all to unite, to institute rules of justice and
peace that would bind the strong and weak in mutual obligations, making
special exceptions for no one. “In short,” wrote Rousseau, this man pro-
claimed “instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us gather them
into one supreme power that governs us according to wise laws, that protects
and defends all the members of the association, repulses common enemies,
and maintains us in an eternal accord” (1987, 70).
Rousseau comments that far less than this must have been required to
convince people who were so easily seduced, who lived in constant dispute,
and who were slaves to their own and others’ greed and ambition. Th ey ran
into their own chains, believing that they would thereby secure their liberty.
Th e few who could foresee the dangers were those who had already planned
to profi t from them. Th ese arrangements “gave new fetters to the weak and
new forces to the rich” (1987, 70). In such societies, political institutions
and laws frequently failed to create a genuine alternative to rule by force.
Although less immediately corporeal in their eff ect, they transformed usur-
pation and theft into a right of whoever was best disposed to impose their
will over and against others. “Th e profi t of a few ambitious men [thereby]
henceforth subjected the entire human race to labor, servitude, and mis-
ery” (ibid.). Th e establishment of one society made the creation of oth-
ers a necessity. Th ese multiplied, covering “the entire surface of the earth,”
spreading national war, battles and reprisals in their wake (ibid.). Rousseau
emphasizes that it is not possible to return to nascent society or primitive
anarchism. In his Discourse on Political Economy and On the Social Contract,
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48 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
to which i will turn in Chapter 2, Rousseau instead sought to reconstitute
these depraved men and women through an act of legitimate rather than
counterfeit political association.
But more immediately worthy of emphasis is how the capacity of making
comparative evaluations which opens with the distance between being and
seeming is both indispensable to the emergence of inequalities and the pos-
sibility of curbing their detrimental consequences. In other words, the same
abstract thinking necessary to political life—specifi cally, the work of under-
standing how sociality mediates individual and collective needs suggested
by the notion of a common good—enables us simultaneously, and far more
frequently, to distance ourselves from ourselves and others in alienated rela-
tions that rely upon submerging empathetic repugnance at the suff ering of
sentient others that, in Rousseau’s story of the species, once arrested us.
Ernst Cassirer, in outlining a philosophy of human culture, insists that
what sets apart human from nonhuman animals is not the ability to read
and respond to (at times, complex) signs which nonhuman animals can also
decode and detect, but our inhabiting a symbolic world. A study of the ana-
tomical structure of a particular animal species off ers, through a view of its
inner life, insight into its outer one as well since for all intents and purposes
these are joined respectively as the receptor and eff ector which form a func-
tional system through which the animal is fi tted to its physical environment.
When one turns to human beings, this circle is not only quantitatively but
also qualitatively enlarged. Writes Cassirer, “Man has, as it were, discovered
a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor
system and the eff ector system, which are to be found in all animal species,
we fi nd in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system”
(1944, 24). Th is does not only open a broader but “new dimension of real-
ity.” Unlike organic reactions to external stimuli are human responses that
do not only off er delayed but considered answers to such prompts.
Here, considering Rousseau, Cassirer emphasizes that “at fi rst sight such
a delay may appear to be a very questionable gain,” unambiguously a de-
terioration of human nature or of what might, in principle follow from
our raw physical potential (1944, 24). But, as Rousseau at times reluctantly
conceded, we cannot escape from this achievement. We, as the anatomies
of nonhuman organisms, cannot but adopt the conditions of our lives—a
physical and deeply symbolic universe. Th e latter imbues all that it envelops
with mediation. “No longer,” Cassirer explains, “can man confront reality
immediately; he cannot see it, as it were face to face. Physical reality seems
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 49
to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of deal-
ing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with
himself ” (25).
To understand the full import of the claim that it is symbolic thought
and behavior that are the most characteristic features of human life and
that what we understand as our progress is based upon the conditions they
enable, Cassirer (1944, 32) emphasized, that it is crucial to understand the
diff erence between signals—which belong to the physical world of and have
substantial being—and symbols which belong to the human world and
have only functional value. A sign is related to the thing to which it refers
in a fi xed way; one sign refers to one individual thing. By contrast, a hu-
man symbol is marked by its versatility and mobility—one can express the
same meaning in various languages or with multiple terms (36). With them,
one can develop general categories and talk in abstractions rather than only
of concrete facts and immediate situations or circumstances (41). Without
such symbolism, in other words, we would be confi ned to biological needs
and practical interests without access to an ideal world.
It is between the dangers and possibilities of this predicament that Rous-
seau writes. At once, he emphasizes that were it not for our ability to think
in general terms, political life—or a domain that seeks to break into, inter-
rupt, and introduce a new logic within relations otherwise overdetermined
by cyclical relations premised solely upon might—could not emerge. It is
our ability to connect particular instances of forms of life or phenomena
with larger structurally similar groups and categories that enables us to envi-
sion forms of communal and collective life; that makes it possible for us to
introduce through acts of our moral freedom our own principles for shared
conduct. At the same time, the spaces opened up by such mediation also
suggest a world of being literally entrapped by ourselves—of everywhere
encountering only our person.
It was precisely this weakness that struck Rousseau most about the writers
and readers of travelogues of European explorers and colonizers of his own
day, writings on which he drew heavily and that were treated by many dis-
tinguished philosophers as legitimate empirical data on African, Asian, and
New World peoples. As mentioned earlier, the hunger for these was pro-
found: Lahontan’s 1703 New Voyages to North America went through twenty-
fi ve editions by 1758, shaping impressions of New France and through them
discussions of nature and freedom (Dobie 2010, 177). Foreshadowing Rous-
seau, Lahonton positively depicted the distaste of the Hurons for private
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50 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
property and European technological advances, claiming that they looked
down on the hierarchical relations of French society that required an obedi-
ence befi tting slaves (179). In addition, a subgenre of fi ction had developed
in which Native North Americans engaged in dialogues with travelers, criti-
cizing European mores from a primitivist perspective (180).
For Rousseau, in spite of his personal fascination with them, the travel
accounts themselves betrayed an incapacity on the part of their writers to
perceive the most meaningful and important forms and implications of hu-
man diff erence. He stated:
For three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe have
inundated the other parts of the world, and continually published new
collections of voyages and reports, I am persuaded that we know no
other men except the Europeans; furthermore, it appears, from the
ridiculous prejudices which have not died out even among Men of
Letters, that under the pompous nature of the study of man everyone
does hardly anything except study the men of his country. In vain do
individuals come and go; it seems that Philosophy does not travel.
(CW 3:84)
Philosophy with a capital P was the kind that he criticized in his First Dis-
course. Unlike philosophy or critical refl ection, its sources and products were
vanity and vice, the rationalization of political worlds that were fundamen-
tally illegitimate. Rousseau distinguished the role of Christian missionaries
from the sailors, merchants, and soldiers who also undertook such voyages.
In particular, he suggested that the skills of the former were not the same as
those necessary to undertake work in the human sciences since they seemed
able to articulate the worthiness of potential converts only by likening them
to one, undiff erentiated European notion of human character. In other
words, on this model, equality had to be based on uniformity or sameness.
Th is was precisely the criticism that Tzvetan Todorov made of Bartolomé
de Las Casas. Although surely to be celebrated for arguing against the most
brutal policies of Spanish colonial armies, he could only make such defenses
by minimizing genuine diff erences between himself and the indigenous
communities he encountered, by constantly indexing them in terms of their
potential moral salvation. By contrast, writers like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,
who assumed the radical inferiority of the indigenous people of Mexico and
the Caribbean, in eff orts to garner evidence, documented their distinctive
ways of life (Todorov 1999, 151–17). Rousseau wrote:
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 51
To preach the Gospel usefully, zeal alone is necessary and God gives the
rest; but to study men, talents are necessary that God is not obligated
to give anyone, and that are not always the lot of Saints. One does not
open a book of voyages without fi nding descriptions of characters and
morals. But one is completely amazed to see that these People who have
described so many things have said only what everyone already knew,
that they have known how to perceive, at the other end of the world,
only what it was up to them to notice without leaving their street; and
that those true features that distinguish Nations and strike eyes made to
see have almost always escaped theirs. (CW 3:85)
He imagined if instead a Montesquieu or a Buff on, a Diderot, a d’Alembert,
or a Condillac were to visit Turkey or Egypt, Morocco or Guinea. “Let us
suppose that these new Hercules, back from these memorable treks, then
wrote at leisure the natural, moral, and political history of what they would
have seen: we ourselves would see a new world sally forth from their pen,
and we would thus learn to know our own” (Rousseau 1987, 100n10). Th ese
men, we might conclude, would in so doing, act as if Newton had been at
the armchair of the political leaders of his day. By contrast, it would be “ter-
ribly simple-minded” to take at their word the conclusions of “unsophisti-
cated travelers” (ibid.).
Rousseau concluded that although Europeans had set themselves up as
the world’s judges, sometimes with the best, if moralistic, of intentions, their
understanding of the peoples that they relegated to lower order species was at
best superfi cial projection. Th ey had missed a unique opportunity to engage
in human study. Th eir bodies had traveled miles but they were incapable
of perceiving that human beings could forge alternative life worlds, could
think, act, and aspire otherwise. In their failures to see these larger possi-
bilities, they had also missed an important opportunity for self- clarifi cation.
As Roxanne Euben observes, while travel for many betokens the possibility
through unpredictable exchange of transformed imaginaries and identities,
senses of “self, knowledge, time, and space . . . transfi gured by the dou-
bled mediation between [the] familiar and unfamiliar,” it is unpredictable
whether one’s disposition will in fact be open to such enlightenment (2008,
12). Physical movement on its own is no assurance. Indeed it may encourage
the petrifi cation of unrefl ected upon identities and imaginaries.
Rousseau considered this to have been the case with the writings he en-
gaged here: Th e aims of travelers had not been actually to encounter the
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52 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
people about whom they felt compelled to write, but instead to aggrandize
themselves and off er rationalizations for illegitimate self-enrichment: “We
know nothing of the Peoples of the East Indies, who have been frequented
solely by Europeans more desirous to fi ll their purses than their heads. All of
Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as distinctive in character as in color,
are still to be examined; the whole earth is covered by Nations of which
we know only the names—yet we dabble in judging the human race” (CW
3:85–86). None, Rousseau suggested, had genuinely considered a phenom-
enon that contradicted the reasoning at the core of narratives of imperial
enlightenment: “that [while] the Europeans torment themselves in order to
acclimate the savages of various countries to their lifestyle, they have not yet
been able to win over a single one of them” (1987, 106n16), that those they
encountered constantly refused to imitate the Europeans or to covet their
displays of luxury and wealth while there were countless examples of the
reverse: of French and other Europeans who in more contemporary parlance
“went native,” taking refuge in these other nations, “no longer able to leave
so strange a lifestyle” (ibid.). For Rousseau, the idea that cultural mixing (or
creolization) might positively result from such encounters was unfathom-
able. Th e best possibility was that Europeans, moved by the people they
encountered, attempted to peel away their own corrupted ways of life.
As Anthony Pagden writes, “[Rousseau’s Caribs] are contemporary with
the reader, yet they belong to a period of human infancy. It was a paradox
for all those who saw in this new land the image of a world which man, in
his progress from the state of nature to civil society had had to abandon.
Th ey, these ‘savages,’ are not like us as we are now, the argument went, they
are like us as we once were” (1993, 117). For Rousseau, such people are most
signifi cant as evidence that the developments he describes are not inexo-
rable; he sees in them highly signifi cant acts of refusal: Although in the notes
rather than the main text, and even there, as almost a fi nal thought, Rous-
seau (1987, 106n16) claims, “It is something extremely remarkable that . . .
[n]othing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have against appro-
priating our mores and living in our way.” If they were as miserable as was
claimed and the European alternative so unquestionably preferable, why did
they refuse to imitate Europeans?
Rousseau goes on to describe “savages” brought to Paris and London
who showed no excitement about displays of luxury, wealth, or “curious
arts” (1987, 106n16); people from Greenland and Iceland raised and fed in
Denmark who died of sadness and despair; the failed eff orts of the Dutch
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 53
to convert a single Hottentot—even when taken in infancy and raised with
European customs and Christian principles—who, fi nally in a situation in
which he might make a choice, decided to renounce the clothing, religion,
and ways of life into which he had been socialized, keeping only what con-
nected him emotionally to his individual relationship to the governor him-
self (ibid.).
All of this presents a paradox, however: if we rigorously follow Rous-
seau’s reasoning, the Caribs and Hottentots when presented as original men
(“which of all existing peoples has so far deviated least from the state of
nature”) who have not yet been transformed by sedentary living, appear, at
least in the main, to be without the capabilities of complex reasoning that
make both willing and moral freedom and full-fl edged alienation possible.
He wrote:
All the kinds of knowledge that demand refl ection, all those acquired
only by the concatenation of ideas and perfected only successively, ap-
pear to be utterly beyond the grasp of savage men, owing to the lack of
communication with his fellow-man, that is to say, owing to the lack
of the instrument which is used for that communication, and to the
lack of the needs that make it necessary. . . . [S]ince they depend exclu-
sively on bodily exercise and are not capable of any communication or
progress from one individual to another, the fi rst man could have been
just as adept at them as his last descendants. (1987, 87n6)
At the same time, here are individuals whose full abilities presumably are
now active, if nothing else, through the arrival and imposition of Europeans.
And they do, at least as individuals, choose to reject what is on off er. One
might qualify that Rousseau does state that decisions over happiness are
reckonings made by the sentiments rather than by reason; that these natural
men can sniff the dangers on the horizon (1987, 107n16). Still, it is hard to
conceive of opting for what constitutes Europe’s prehistory as nothing more
than the work of instincts. It seems instead, even if contradicting Rous-
seau’s eff orts to valorize these men precisely because they are more natural
and uncorrupted by the infl uences of culture, as a decision, an outgrowth of
comparison and refl ection.
Even then, however, the possibilities linked to this signal “no” prove lim-
ited. As Pagden comments, “[Th e savage] has been driven forward by his
‘discoverers’ and up the temporal scale, to confront a world he fi nds abomi-
nable. But it is also, as he sometimes recognizes, a world that will one day
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54 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
be his own. He can only escape it . . . by returning to the woods. Only there
can he hope to live for a while unmolested. . . . His society . . . as readers
could not have failed to be aware, is in the process of being absorbed into a
European one . . . and they are themselves in the process of being colonized”
(1993, 138–39). Pagden concludes that this produces a despairing conclusion:
that “the ‘savage,’ however defi ned, could ultimately have no place outside
a world system whose character was already markedly European, yet could
never survive as a ‘savage’ within it” (188).
In his Social Contract, Rousseau would describe both conquest and en-
slavement as impossible to articulate in terms of political right. Th e former
could create a subjugated multitude or an aggregate but neither an associa-
tion, polity, nor people. Both turned on the so-called “right of the stron-
gest” or the claim that any individual or people who overcame others did
so legitimately. Rousseau contended that force could elicit little more than
acts of necessity and prudence. Without independent acts of consent, these
simply set one person’s private interest up against those of others, refl ecting
a readiness to divide the human species into “herds of livestock, each with
its leader, who tends it in order to devour it” (CW 4:132, 137).
Rousseau’s “prehistory” challenged the inevitability of this outcome, fi rst
by off ering a portrait of more fully satisfi ed, if less resourced people and
communities, and secondly, through his turn to supposedly empirical ex-
amples of “real” natural men and women. Th ough he formally posited
such people as occupying the middle stage of his conjectural history, he
also referred to them when characterizing the capabilities of original natural
people both before the emergence of sedentary living and in more primi-
tive places encountered by European explorers as examples of the vigor of
less domesticated people able to be absorbed primarily, if not wholly, in an
eternal present.
inside-out paradoxes
Because of the governing theodicean framework of Rousseau’s analysis, one
might accurately surmise that much of Rousseau’s writings was an expres-
sion of nostalgic longing—of wishing to return to that which he could only
access through imaginative and creative endeavors. However, there is an in-
teresting irony: Rousseau’s prizing of that which was disdained as backward
was generative in ways that transcended his own life and writing. Not only
have his Second Discourse and Essay on the Origins of Language been credited
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 55
as founding works in anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, his early Dis-
sertation on Modern Music, which challenged the adequacy of European the-
ories of harmony for describing the full range of world music, is considered
fundamental to the development of the fi eld of ethnomusicology. In other
words, if Rousseau’s ideas about human diff erence did not refl ect the possi-
bility of creolization, his methods or approaches to his own inquiries, which
were heavily synthetic, surely did. Not only did his explorations traverse the
vast domains that comprise human symbolic life, he turned ecumenically
to whatever resources he could fi nd in music, the study of language, litera-
ture, philosophy, and natural history. Crucially, in addition, his investiga-
tions were always colored by a melancholic challenge to the injustices that
he thought were expressed in and the result of the unambiguously positive
qualities ascribed to what were called both enlightenment and civilization.
Emphasizing the losses of each developmental stage that culminated in
what was seen as everyone’s future, he came upon paradoxes and dilemmas
that revealed some of the most diffi cult and interesting questions of what it
meant to be a human being. While there are reasons for qualifying the view
that Rousseau was a political radical, there is no doubt that he was a radical
thinker: Nothing excited him more than tracing roots and origins that de-
manded grand explanatory stories. No questions or considerations encoun-
tered en route were too off -putting to go without mention. While asking
whether those poised to undertake scholarly work in fact possessed the in-
dependence of mind to do so, his allegiances to disavowed spaces and times
enabled him to break from monopolizing concerns, embracing (perhaps
even enjoying) blame and shame over trying to please his contemporaries.
Although this disposition, of remaining the radical outsider while fo-
menting lively public debate, proved harder rigorously to embody than he
might have initially thought, as a commitment, coupled with his vast cre-
ative breadth, daring imagination, and brilliant craft, it proved highly gen-
erative. Indeed, as stated earlier, when the association founded in his honor
meets critically to engage his rich legacy, the range of scholarly fi elds that
converge is impressive. His work, in other words, synthesized domains of
life and study that have since splintered into autonomous areas of inquiry.
We might ask, in a Rousseauian spirit, whether the development toward
such specialization has not brought signifi cant casualties in its wake.
It is not accidental that Rousseau reserved some of his most acerbic re-
marks for his references to academic posts and positions. Read through his
subsequent writings, and some of his early comments about philosophy,
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56 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
one can conclude that added to his other fears about arts and sciences was a
sense that with academies develop distinct classes of scholars, who might, as
government representatives he would so fi ercely criticize, develop their own
partial, self-preserving group will. As he later made clear, in both the Second
Discourse and his controversial collisions with D’Alembert over the potential
institution of a theater in Geneva, Rousseau ultimately concluded that
stark and sedimented divisions of labor easily became entrenched. Repro-
ducing over generations, they then over-determined group situational dif-
ferences that became near impossible to mediate in political life or reconcile
into a shared, general will. Scholars, one might also surmise, would develop
their own excessively specialized language that rather than enabling unique
political forms of communication among assembled citizens become a gate-
keeping way to secure their own privileged role. Tracing the development
of language, Rousseau would argue that what began in gestural expressions
of want, it was only with the rise of trade that human beings needed pho-
netic and easily translatable and legible alphabets that, once modernized,
became writing. As the communication of feelings was displaced by that
concerning abstract ideas, most developed forms of languages became those
best designed for exchanging money and arms, that, in George Orwell’s
1946 observations, could “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”
(2005, 120). Finally, steeped in norms of abstraction, Rousseau suggested
that those devoted exclusively to mental work developed thicker skins—
one’s within which it was far easier to ignore or evade otherwise visceral
experiences of other people’s suff ering.
At the same time, as the breadth and originality of Rousseau’s own life
work indicates, he did not contend that all study must be narrowly instru-
mental, demonstrably advancing a clearly or immediately known good.
(Indeed, some subsequent scholars have suggested that it was precisely the
ambiguity of his writings that contributed to their timelessness [Swenson
2000]). If this were so, there would surely have been no room for the tor-
tured, dogged acknowledgment and exploration of contradictions. Still, the
work did aim to illuminate the alienated condition of humankind. After
all, Rousseau’s own early aims were to restore an image of a pure, uncor-
rupted person on the basis of which he could explain the origins of inequali-
ties and challenge their legitimacy as “natural.”
In doing so, however, Rousseau engaged in what Nelson Maldonado Tor-
res (2009) has called an “anti-European Eurocentrism”: while problematiz-
ing Europe’s governing values and valorizing the Caribs and Amerindians
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 57
and Hottentots as remaining in more primitive states that we would all
more happily occupy, he in fact denies these groups, as we have seen, “all
the kinds of knowledge that demand refl ection, all those acquired only by
the concatenation of ideas and perfected only successively” (Rousseau 1987,
87n6). Th ese are the very capacities that prove indispensable to the acts of
willing at the core of the moral freedom that is distinctively human. While
their earlier points on a singular trajectory are not framed as a natural failing,
but instead the result of a complex of environmental accidents, he does not
entertain that these groups might have collectively (rather than in individual
acts of refusal) chosen to reject the introduction of private property or un-
equal political relations or adopted both along with institutions to counter
their greatest dangers. Instead, as Sankar Muthu (2003, 8) has demonstrated
convincingly, while Rousseau’s scathing criticisms of Europe and account
of people as “self-making creatures” whose freedom can entrench alienation
or secure its antithesis informed the explicitly anti-imperial writings of Di-
derot, Kant, and Herder, he remained as Anthony Pagden (1993, 142–43)
has shown, squarely in the noble savage tradition of Michel de Montaigne,
looking for empirical evidence of living primitives, free from artifi ce.
Th ese interpretations of New World people did challenge the more wide-
spread ones that assumed their genetic, behavioral, and cultural inferiority
that were taken to legitimate well-entrenched and expanding colonial activi-
ties. Still, in Muthu’s estimation, they collapsed into paradoxes that made
“the possibility of meaningful commiseration remote” (2003, 13). For while
turning “presumed savagery into a badge of honour,” this “ultimately cast
them as lacking the cultural agency that would have made them recogniz-
ably human” (23). Muthu emphasizes, here with Starobinski (1988, 327),
that in trying to emphasize the distance that human beings have traveled
from their supposedly natural to corrupted state, Rousseau lands up hu-
manizing certain animals—insisting that orangutans belong in the human
species—and animalizing certain human beings (Muthu 2003, 43).
In this context, one might consider several lines from Fanon: Emphasiz-
ing that he had no mercy for former governors or missionaries, he wrote,
“To us, the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abomi-
nates him” (1967, 8). Both ultimately engaged in processes that he con-
sidered disastrously dehumanizing: First, the creation and then demanding
expectation that colonized people not make meaning for themselves, but
exemplify and embody a role “already there, pre-existing, waiting” for them
(134) and that “this role is always a comparative and relative, rather than
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58 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
inherent one” (211). However noble Rousseau’s intentions and ultimately
signifi cant for subsequent developments in the human sciences, the mean-
ing of the Carib, the Hottentot, and the Amerindian exhibit all of these ori-
entations: a priori admiration (the inverse to the “black problem”); a priori
purposes posited from without; a priori comparative role in a discussion in
which the setting of the terms were entirely monopolized by the relevant
outside interlocutors.
Th ere is, however, a striking irony. Even if it was not as author of the
prize-winning First Discourse but instead of the Second Discourse (which was
not even seriously considered by the Academy of Dijon), “Rousseau has
both been held responsible for the French Revolution [by Edmund Burke,
Napolean Bonaparte, and G. W. F. Hegel, among others] and acclaimed
as the founder of modern social science” (Cranston 1991, 293). Th e Second
Discourse, in addition to off ering a theory of the evolution of human beings
that anticipated Darwin and propelled the study of anthropology and lin-
guistics in new directions, did add to his earlier refl ections both subtlety and
a conjectural history of the origin and development of inequalities as inter-
twined fundamentally with the very emergence of human societies. While
most of his contemporaries optimistically affi rmed the naturalness of both
sociality and reasonable collective life on the one hand, and inequalities on
the other, Rousseau outlined a secular theodicy in which the most pertinent
and destructive diff erences among people were not those of nature, but pro-
duced through social conventions or through how we, as human beings,
live within society. And throughout, as we have already seen, what enabled
him to diagnose “developments” as moments of degeneration were the criti-
cal juxtapositions embodied by the fi gure of the Carib.
concluding paradoxes
Few social theorists, especially French or Francophone ones, writing after
Rousseau have failed to comment on the signifi cance of his method to the
development of their respective social scientifi c fi elds of inquiry. Emile Durk -
heim (1960), for example, in his “forerunners to sociology” book, credited
Rousseau with correctly formulating the relationship of nature to society—
that the latter did not emerge “naturally” from the former but was account-
able to both what it indicated about human being and how, from its vantage
point, society could be judged. For French philosopher and anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), Rousseau was the “father of ethnology,” who
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 59
had grasped in his Essay on the Origins of Languages that “to study men,
one has to look close by; but in order to study man, one has to learn to
cast one’s eyes far off ; fi rst one has to observe the diff erences in order to
discover the properties” (Rousseau 1998, 305). For Marxist literary theorist
Fredric Jameson, what is most useful in Rousseau is not his particular ideas
or opinions, but how he engages in political reasoning. For Jameson, Rous-
seau “is prepared to follow his own thinking into the unthinkable . . . [in a]
process, in which confi dence in reasoning leads the thinker on fearlessly into
a cul-de-sac” (2009, 306). In these astonishing displays, one witnesses “a
reasoning so self-punishing in the demands it makes on itself that it renders
the problem insoluble and in eff ect incapacitates itself ” (ibid.). Crucially,
however, “[this] does not demonstrate the weakness of Rousseau’s capacity
for thought . . . so much as . . . [its] power and his frightening resolve to
follow his own reasoning wherever it leads him” (307). In it, thought arrives
“neither [at] impossibility nor diachronic incoherence . . . but rather [at]
contradiction, the very motor power of the dialectic itself ” (308).
By contrast, for Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003), it
was Rousseau, together with the Spanish New World theologian and writer,
Bartholomé de Las Casas, who most eff ectively mobilized “the savage slot”
to implore fellow Europeans to imagine that the modernity that they tried
to establish as the singular future was neither inevitable nor necessarily desir-
able. Rousseau, in other words, more explicitly than countless others, used
a state of nature and the fi gure of the natural man to shore up legitimate
grounds for criticism aimed at his own European contemporaries. Th is was
powerful precisely because the stakes were clear and the arguments were ex-
plicitly counterpunctual and highly public (Trouillot 2003, 135). Th eir moral
optimism was “sharpened . . . by Rousseau’s social and political skepticism”
(ibid.). Trouillot suggests that this kind of optimism, increasingly disavowed
by anthropologists, was in fact the fi eld’s greatest strength. In an eff ort to
deny the observer rights to sensibilities, many suggest that moral optimism
is the same as social optimism and naïveté (135). Still, he writes, there is a
need to hang on to this aspect of the history of the fi eld since, simply put,
“the alternatives are lousy” (139).
For empiricists skeptical of Rousseau’s heavily inductive approach, it is
worth bearing in mind, as Robert Wokler has emphasized, “No one before
Rousseau came closer to conceiving human history as mankind’s descent
from an ape. His entirely speculative portrait of the orangutan as a kind
of speechless savage in the state of nature happens, moreover, to have been
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60 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
coincidentally drawn with greater empirical accuracy than any description
of that animal’s behavior for at least the next two hundred years—that is,
until the fi eldwork undertaken in Southeast Asia since the late 1960’s by
Birute Galdikas, John MacKinnon, and Peter Rodman” (2001, 62). Buff on
had insisted on a radical break between nonhuman and human animals, or
on a “break in the chain of being.” Pivotal for him, especially in the case of
orangutans, was that they could neither speak nor reason. For Rousseau,
human beings were uniquely spiritual, but language, which was long in de-
velopment and had painstakingly to be learned and mastered, could not be
defi nitive proof for humanity of people and lack of it in other creatures. Th e
only way of showing defi nitively that orangutans were not protohuman was
through observing the fertility of the progeny of a human-orangutan union.
Although Rousseau was convinced by the fi xity of species created by G-d,
his controversial questions about orangutans, the closeness of savage man to
animals, and portrait of radical shifts in human nature in our development,
stimulated investigations into whether distinct species might be genetically
similar or linked in sequential relations, research that eventually replaced the
fi xed species view with one of metamorphosis and transformation (58–62).
Finally, in the study of ethnomusicology, Rousseau is also cited as a
founding fi gure (Nettl 1964, 13) for his inclusion in his well-known ency-
clopedia of music of examples of folk, Chinese, and Native American forms
and more general rejection of the view of music as sound in favor of one
through which it is conceived as comprising unique forms of culturally situ-
ated communication (Scott 1998, xxxviii). Rousseau’s fi rst published work
was a song. He did fi rst go to Paris with a new system of musical notation
that he thought would ease transposing and the learning of beginners. His
central involvement in debates over the relative merits of French and Ital-
ian opera generated as much notoriety as his First Discourse while his opera,
“Le Devin du village,” was performed four hundred times in fi fty years,
including as the fi rst work following the reopening of the Paris Opera after
the fall of the Bastille. In addition to writing most of the entries on music
for Diderot’s Encyclopédia, when he referred to “his trade” it was as a music
copyist, a role through which he transcribed 11,200 pages of music in the
fi nal 7 years of his life. Finally, his “Chanson Nègre,” a melody he wrote to
creole folksong lyrics given to him by a gentleman named Flamanville from
Normandy, who had never traveled to the islands, is seen as having off ered
defi nitive evidence that creole languages of the Francophone Caribbean de-
veloped as early as the late 1600s, signifi cantly earlier than many scholars
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Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry 61
had previously surmised (Aurenche 1921, 13–37; Bernard 1996; Confi ant
2009; De Beer 1972; Kein 2000).
How is it that a fi gure who announced himself as challenging the moral
value of work in the arts and sciences could have such a legacy? As the strands
of argument that combine in this chapter hopefully suggest, Rousseau was
profoundly ambivalent about the uniquely human domain of symbolic life
described by Ernst Cassirer. Wishing for an ever-elusive transparency so that
one might directly encounter oneself and others, he pinned such clarity on
peoples who had been framed as backward. With a sense of the injustice at
the misperception of the relative merits of their versus his own society, he
imagined alternative possibilities, ones he considered to be less alienated.
Although his framework suggested that those he praised were in fact people
with incompletely realized latent faculties, including those through which
political freedom is articulated, in so doing, his moral optimism combined
with a sharp social pessimism producing a sense of possibility that was not
naïve. Always heavily inductive and seemingly idiosyncratic, while he set
much store on his eff orts to be radically outside of the social worlds he
inhabited, it was his syntheses of the multiple ways he occupied them that
instead produced such bold and fruitful questions and ideas.
In spite of the radical creativity of Rousseau’s many undertakings—his
genius as a generalist—if Rousseau remained only with the “noble savage,”
with the diffi cult and ultimately limited eff orts to think beyond Europe by
thinking before it, there would be little reason to try to creolize his ideas.
He moved, if not completely, beyond this position in his Social Contract,
suggesting that while some general wills have become mute and decayed
there are others that are still emergent. He pinned such unique opportuni-
ties for legitimate governance outside of Western Europe. Th ese gestures
toward what we are calling a creolized inquiry, clearly informed by his own
real and imagined personal alienation, stimulated forms of political refl ec-
tion unlikely otherwise to have emerged. At the same time, Fanon’s thought
takes these ideas where Rousseau could not reach, exploring them in and
through insights borne directly out of the contradictions and challenges
of the creolized Francophone empire. Off ering distinct descriptions of co-
lonial encounters and their eff ects, Fanon’s insights grow out of the abil-
ity to incorporate seemingly incompatible and closed but in fact porous
sources of knowledge more adequately to grasp the ever-shifting terrain of
human reality. Th ese are marked by methodological, theoretical, political,
and disciplinary generality in which traces of the sources from which they
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62 Delegitimating Decadent Inquiry
are derived remain evident but are not genealogically reducible to them.
As such they off er a counter model to the form of political and academic
retrenchment which hinders the ability to make productive juxtapositions
that, often emerging out of cultural confrontation and historical rupture,
can lead to more adequately universalist political postures.
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63
2
Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
To state reality is a wearing task.
—frantz fanon
Although Fanon never explicitly engaged Rousseau—he only names Rous-
seau once along with other liberal French writers that he mocks—Fanon
shared with Rousseau an eff ort to challenge the ways that reason had been
used to advance the singularity of particular models of desirable politi-
cal arrangements and ways of being human. Much like Rousseau, Fanon
sought out the points where preferred frameworks confronted their oppo-
sites. However, if with Rousseau there were men and women ready to affi rm
themselves in refuting these approaches, for Fanon the advance and normal-
ization of colonial relations pushed the colonized into a complex complicity.
Indeed it was only when people deliberately shut out of political life and
history rejected this liminal or damned location through directly challeng-
ing their unfreedom that imposed projects could be eff ectively resituated as
one of many.
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64 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
unwelcome arrivals bearing truths rather evaded
Much like Rousseau, Fanon became a public fi gure through published
writing bearing unwelcome truths. His Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter
cited as BSWM), written in energetic bursts between 1949 and 1950, echoed
Rousseau’s challenges to scholars and writers driven by desires for fl attering
public opinion. Not focused on scholastic subtleties but questions of disa-
lienation with ramifi cations for everyone, Fanon frankly stated, “No one has
asked for this book, especially not those at whom it is directed” (BSWM, 7).
Indeed, in a paradox resembling those of the previous chapter, the sign that
what it off ered was necessary could be measured precisely by the degree to
which it was not sought. Here and elsewhere, as I will soon explore in more
detail, Fanon writes as a psychiatrist who knows that when one nears the
“real issues,” or those that decisively determine the situation of the relevant
subjects, those most in need of facing them mobilize all of their resources
of evasion. Central among these, of course, is reason. Aiming at something
quite diff erent from pleasing readers, he writes, “because there are too many
idiots in the world and having said that I must prove it” (BSWM, 7). He
proceeds to treat idiocy as a symptom of widespread social and political
pathologies that must be understood lest they be mended.
Whereas Rousseau had pinned his theoretical orientation and credibility
to his peripheral location through which he identifi ed with margins more
generally, Fanon was a product of Lycée Schoelcher in the French territory
of Martinique and of qualifying training in psychiatry in Lyons. Still, the
man Fanon and his writings were, without any of his own encouragement,
perceived to have come from a nowhere for which no one was prepared.
Indeed, from the moment of its publication in 1952, BSWM was revolution-
ary. “Insofar as questions about blackness fi gured at all in the discourse of
the early 1950s,” writes Fanon’s former intern and biographer, Alice Cherki,
their discussion “was the purview of a white intelligentsia.” While those
who occupied the world of ideas could contemplate debates over the nature
and meaning of racialization, they were “deeply unsettled when a black man
took it upon himself to enter the discussion” (Cherki 2006, 26). It was not
that there was no established place for black novels and poems. Franco-
phone creative writing was emerging in the postwar period as a genre of
“exotic literature” (Macey 2002, 160). Fanon’s, by contrast, was a theoreti-
cal and analytical work that received a “baffl ed, even indignant reception.”
Not only a “thorn” for all but the progressive Christian publications (Macey
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 65
2002, 27), it also shocked his fellow Antilleans whose largely assimilationist
politics was not one that emphasized or embraced questions that drew at-
tention to their blackness.
Rousseau, as I have argued, pinned much on moments when colonized
individuals symbolically rejected the off erings of supposedly irresistible
French modernity. Th ese fi gures, without the gaps between being and
seeming that defi ned the decadent, off ered a comparative lens to gauge the
losses of what were presented as desirable forms of development. In Rous-
seau’s account, their refusals appeared as adamant as they were refl exive and
unambiguous. For Fanon, the acts that Rousseau sought proved very rare.
Indeed BSWM off ers a consideration of the false dilemmas that make choos-
ing alienation almost inevitable. Eff orts to evade the necessity of disalien-
ation or of dismantling these governing terms could only produce multiple
failures, all of which express what it is to live in conformity with a category
that one plays no role in constituting.
Fanon, like Rousseau, wrote of a world in which people were overdeter-
mined from without. As if echoing Rousseau, Fanon refl ected, “What I call
middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidifi ed in predetermined
forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call
middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is
tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who
takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary” (BSWM, 225).
Still, repressive social norms of politesse, however life-evacuating, were not
his primary focus. It turned more to a particular form of racialized categori-
zation that prematurely foreclosed both the being of the particular black and
white person and their relations with others. In other words, to the sharp
economic inequalities that nurtured and reproduced opaque and alienated
relations of masters and slaves, Fanon adds explicit projects of dehumaniza-
tion through which it is not only labor and land extracted from the colo-
nized, but their full position as people with agency.
While one hears, Fanon remarks, that the Negro makes himself inferior,
the truth is that he is made so (BSWM, 149). Central to this process is
the governing expectation that one conform with a category “that identi-
fi ed [one] from a distance, without inquiry, without exchange of a single
word” (Ehlen 2001, 87). In what Lewis Gordon has called a “perverse form
of anonymity,” these prescriptions were ubiquitous, evident as much when
policemen, teachers, or employers, would say without any necessary sense
of qualifi cation, that they “knew blacks” or when physicians would address
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66 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
all North Africans in pidgin, angry if the relevant man or woman expressed
a sense of insult in standard French (BSWM, 32). Indeed, Fanon empha-
sizes that in colonial societies, there is much greater comfort in confronting
people from the colonies who off er opportunities for charitable shows of
good will. While seemingly generous, however, such displays in fact cau-
tioned the colonized person to keep his place; fastening her to a Negro
effi gy (BSWM, 35). “Willy-nilly,” Fanon writes, “the Negro has to wear the
livery that the white man has sewed for him” (BSWM, 34) out of a thousand
details, anecdotes and stories (BSWM, 111), the “Negro is a toy in the white
man’s hands” (BSWM, 140). As laboratories tried earnestly to produce
denegrifi cation serums, Fanon observed that being black was not provided
by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kin-
esthetic, and visual character.” It was instead the product of a particular set
of commitments: “Let us have the courage to say outright . . . the racist
creates his inferior—the feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the cor-
relative to the European’s [whether he be in Martinique or South Africa]
feeling of superiority” (BSWM, 93). Although he had originally planned to
confi ne this exploration to the Antilles, he was compelled to see that in spite
of the variety of nationalities embodied in black, wherever he or she went,
the Negro remained a Negro (BSWM, 172–72). Fanon commented, “the
Negro is in demand . . . but only if he is made palatable in a certain way”
(BSWM, 176).
Ontological studies of the condition of the black person could not il-
luminate it, Fanon challenged, “not only because the black man must be
black in relation to the white man”—as racial positions are necessarily rela-
tional and incoherent when divorced from these constitutive frameworks—
but also because the relation of the black to the white person “does not
have a converse” (BSWM, 110). Th e categories and positions “white” and
“black” while complementary are not symmetrical: For the black person in
the colonies, the only real eyes are white. It is under their gaze that this new
genus, the Negro, appears. White men and women, by contrast, need not
“meet the black” person’s eyes or, by implication, see themselves with a black
third-person consciousness. “[Alterity] for the white man is always another
white man,” never a black person, who is not an Other but only a space
of projection (Cherki 2006, 32). In particular, the form that projection
takes is a mechanism through which “anything that I fi nd in myself that is
reprehensible or embarrassing, I ascribe to someone else” (BSWM, 97). As a
result, all that is repressed and undesirable, incompatible with an idealized
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 67
racial white identity, together form a caricature “Negro” that amounts to a
psycho-existential deviation or “aberration of the aff ect in the psyche of Af-
ricana peoples” (Henry 2005, 97). Marilyn Nissim-Sabat (2010) insists that
the assimilating of whiteness, a contingent category, to the very defi nition of
what it is to be essentially human, is at the core of antiblack racism. It tells
people who know themselves to be otherwise to live a subhuman status in
relation to that of whites.
At the core of colonized black subjectivity, then, is the necessity of ne-
gotiating a terrain in which one is a real person in direct proportion to
one’s ascent toward (absent) whiteness and renunciation of one’s blackness.
Whether through language or relations of love, one might, as a Negro, try to
move away from the subordinate position attributed to him or her through
assuming French culture and through it the “weight of civilization” (BSWM,
18). In colonial situations in which a people experiences “an inferiority com-
plex . . . created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality”
(ibid.), from black to white “is the course of mutation. One is white as one
is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent” (BSWM, 51–52).
One does not encounter, in other words, Rousseau’s expectations of the
readily resistant “savage” or even Jean-Paul Sartre’s that black poets would
turn against the French language. Instead, Fanon writes plainly, “It is nor-
mal for the Antillean to be anti-Negro . . . [having] taken over all the arche-
types belonging to the European . . . Th ere is no help for it: I am a white
man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me . . . When I am
home, my mom sings me French love songs in which there is never a word
about Negroes. When I disobey . . . I am told to ‘stop acting like a nigger’ ”
(BSWM, 191). In every society there were magazines, games, and fi lms that
directed expressions of aggression. In Europe and its colonies, these were
written by white men for little white men. Showing explorers, adventurers,
and missionaries facing the danger of being eaten by wicked Negroes; these
were similarly read by black children who identifi ed equally intensely with
the protagonists and victors (BSWM, 145). Fanon writes that in Europe the
Negro has the function of symbolizing the lower emotions and baser incli-
nations, the dark side of the soul. Indeed the color black symbolizes evil,
sin, wretchedness, death, war, or famine; all birds of prey are black. When
one taps the unconscious of most white men and women, the black emerges
as the torturer, as Satan, in association with shadows and with dirt, with
sin and bad character, with darkness, abysmal depths, with the ruining of
reputation. He writes, “In Martinique, whose collective unconscious makes
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68 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
it a European country, when a ‘blue’ Negro—a coal-black one—comes to
visit, one reacts at once: ‘What bad luck is he bringing’ ” (BSWM, 190–91).
Still this collective unconscious is not a function of “cerebral heredity . . .
[but] the unrefl ected imposition of a culture.” Antillean boys would talk
constantly of the dangerous Senegalese, only realizing, when in Europe, that
“the Negro” included them too (BSWM, 148).
Between insignifi cant black insularity or the only way out “into the white
world” (BSWM, 51), if appraised solely in terms of his assimilation, the An-
tillean desiring to stand with the real and universal will of course take on the
French language and manner, wanting “to emphasize a rupture” (BSWM,
36). He cannot avoid a choice: “Th e white man’s language gave honorary
citizenship”; French was the key that promised to open barred doors. Th e
rare Martinican might cling to his dialect, “knowing where he is from,” but
doing so trapped him in a sequestered particularity synonymous the world
over with barbarism. It was no diff erent in matters of love, where proverbs
and petty rules from childhood onward governed choices. Th ese were well
captured as enunciated publicly by teachers and mothers in the following
characteristic words, “It is always essential to avoid falling back into the pit
of niggerhood, and every woman in the Antilles, whether in a casual fl irta-
tion or in a serious aff air, is determined to select the least black of the men”
(BSWM, 47–48). Antillean women who traveled to France without any res-
ervations equated marrying a black man with impossibility: “Get out of
that and then deliberately go back? Th ank you, no” (ibid.). It was not that
individual black men did not have good qualities, it was just so much better
to be white. For all this, of course, few such women would ultimately fi nd
that for which they waited.
Perhaps in the most painful of contrasts with Rousseau is Fanon’s fi gure of
Jean Veneuse, the protagonist of René Maran’s 1947 autobiographical novel,
Un homme pareil aux autres, and one of many “little Hottentots whose par-
ents, in the hope of making real Frenchmen out of them, transplant them
to France too early.” For “their own good” weeping parents turn them over
to “gloomy” schools in the French countryside. In Veneuse’s case, it was “to
this schooling that [his] character [owed] its inner melancholy” and fear of
social contact (BSWM, 74). A negative-aggressive type, nursing past disap-
pointments and cultivating a secret zone of bitterness, he assured the near
impossibility of positive experiences that could compensate for the past lack
of self-esteem. With an obsessive feeling of exclusion, he was always ready
to be rejected, subconsciously doing everything to achieve just that catastro-
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 69
phe. Because experiencing his parents’ choice as a form of abandonment, he
dreaded showing himself as he actually was for fear of being disappointing
and maintained an insatiable desire for proof of absolute and incontrovert-
ible love (BSWM, 77–78). Although Veneuse was an abandonment neurotic
who happened to be black, who would, in the absence of antiblackness,
have manufactured principles for his own exclusion (BSWM, 80), his initial
turning over to the school was overdetermined by racialized conditions in
which his parents (and many others like them) conceived of what it meant
to create opportunities for their children as entrusting them to boarding
schools through which it could be assured that they would remain untainted
by the potential liabilities that were their birth parents.
Veneuse is a primary example of a more general observation by Fanon,
one that would again disappoint Rousseau: If his psychic structure is weak,
when a Negro comes in contact with the white world there is a collapse of
the ego. He will stop being an actional person. His goal instead will be for
the Other (in this case necessarily a white Other, since all meaningful Oth-
ers, by defi nition, are racialized white) to give him worth or self-esteem. Th is
is the condition of the Negro as opposed to the black man or woman, as
already suggested. As the site of projection, the Negro is comparison. For the
vast majority, this means to be constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation
and questions of merit when encountering another. Fanon writes, “Th e An-
tilleans have no inherent values of their own, they are always contingent on
the presence of the Other” (BSWM, 211). Th is Antillean will ask if the other
is more intelligent or darker skinned or more respectable with the implica-
tion that one has no inherent worth. Instead one’s own position is based on
relations of dependence. Greedy for security, others appear as mere instru-
ments that should enable “me to realize my subjective security” (BSWM,
212). In sum, “Everything that an Antillean does is done for the Other . . .
because it is the Other who corroborates him” (BSWM, 213). Fanon empha-
sizes that if there are some exceptions, this phenomenon is too widespread
and predictable to be understood as an individual failing. It is rather a func-
tion of a particular environment, of a neurotic society of comparison.
Where being, value, reality, and possibility are white, it is inevitable to
try—in whatever ways might be available, whether through one’s chosen
language or desired lover—to move in that direction, even if it is, by defi ni-
tion, not ultimately accessible to one. In such circumstances, even when a
particular dilemma or issue is not racial, because of the racialized nature
of meaning, everything becomes racially encoded. Fanon observes that it
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70 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
is only if one has been challenged as a man or woman that one begins to
ask if one is a man or a woman. Similarly, “I suff er from not being white”
only to the degree that as a black or colonized person I am “a parasite on the
world . . . a brute beast, that my people and I are like a walking dung-heap
that disgustingly fertilizes sweet sugar cane and silky cotton, that I have no
use in the world” (BSWM, 98). Th en I will try to make myself white, to try
to compel others to acknowledge that I am human. Still, the infernal circle
is inescapable: “I am liked in spite of my color and so too when I am dis-
liked” (BSWM, 117).
Th e sad irony of course is that those who exceed racialized expecta-
tions have it no easier. Th ose who “speak well,” Fanon observes, are treated
with suspicion; the black who quotes Montesquieu appears “to be starting
something.” Although such men and women and black professionals more
generally seemed the obvious contradiction to statements such as “Negroes
are savages; Negroes are brutes or illiterates,” Fanon wrote that a particularly
contractual relationship clung to them. For one, their exceptional status was
always remarked upon: they were not doctors or teachers but the “Negro
doctor” or a “Negro teacher” but, even more signifi cantly, their post came
with an implicit warning: if they made any mistakes, there would be no such
future opportunities for any blacks. As Fanon put it, “As long as everything
went well, he was praised to the skies, but look out, no nonsense, under
any conditions!” (BSWM, 117). While white men and women succeeded
as a race and failed as individuals, with black or colonized people, it was the
reverse.
standing outside of time as petrification
Fanon, unlike Rousseau, declared himself to be “irreducibly” a man of his
times. He could and would not try to step outside of them, instead engag-
ing in the opposite extreme. Rather than always being the foreigner, writing
from elsewhere, to the dismay of some and delight of others, he made the
places to which he moved his own. Not only through identifi cations ex-
pressed in descriptions of himself as the Martinican-Algerian revolutionary
psychologist and philosopher, he also took direct responsibility for and put
his manifold insights and skills in the service of what his new homes would
become. Whereas Rousseau had longed for the position of those occupying
earlier moments in his secularized theodicy, Fanon saw the unique predica-
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 71
ment of the colonized as having been thrown outside of historical time into
a liminal condition of damnation. He was in fact exploring the conditions
for reentering precisely this temporal fl ow, of being resurrected from the
unique petrifi cation that accompanied imperial projects for the vanquished.
He thus emphasizes from the outset of BSWM: “Every human problem
must be considered from the standpoint of time. Ideally, the present will
always contribute to the building of the future. And this future is not the
future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my
existence. . . . Th e future should be an edifi ce supported by living men”
(12–13). To be an agent, capable of being actional required literally “being
present” to all of what Rousseau rejected in the name of independence.
Th is is opposed to being stuck in another’s time or drama. Indeed, as Ato
Sekyi-Otu has emphasized, the lamentation at the core of dehumanization
is not over the “damage done to antique particulars in their ancestral and
wondrous uniqueness” but instead the “deviation from the regular predica-
ment of human intercourse, normal prospects” (2011, 50).
Th is was one of the many diffi culties with the Négritude movement,
as Fanon understood it. Turning to it followed his much cited account of
an encounter with the young boy who pointed him out, declaring, “Look,
a nègre!” Up to this point in the text, Fanon traced eff ort after eff ort to
evade being the “two-dimensional object” of colonial reasoning. Frozen
by the words of the child, he is suddenly “imprisoned in this overwhelm-
ing objectivity” (BSWM, 109). Collapsing under the weight of cannibalism,
slave-ships, tom toms, into a negrifi ed thing, he seeks refuge. Rather than
refusing negrifi cation, he assigns it oppositional value that he embraces. If
emotion, aff ect, corporeality, and spirit were what it was to be black, so be it!
Fanon and the black person struggling to be a human person about whom
he writes will be the essence that is supposedly theirs, that at which, because
of their supposed nature, they can excel. In so doing, Fanon challenges at
once a supremacy of a version of whiteness that supposedly is without this
black character and affi rms a version of black superiority in a “descent into
blackness” that emphasized the limitations of European, colonial man.
A prime response to the racialization that I have been describing, Négri-
tude refurnished that which was ascribed to blackness through renouncing
the imperial present and future in the name of a mystical past that antedated
them (BSWM, 14). Fanon emphasizes how much he needed Négritude; that
as he groped after a reason that kept eluding him, it hailed him, off ering
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72 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
a bath in the irrational. “Since no agreement was possible on the level of
reason,” he describes throwing himself back toward unreason in the form
of a challenge: “It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I”
(BSWM, 123–24). Going back “no longer to sources but to Th e Source”
(BSWM, 126) in a rhythmic attitude of ruling the world with intuition in
an abandon or state of communion. Fanon writes, “Th e white man wants
the world; he wants it for himself alone. . . . But there exist other values that
fi t only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of ‘a certain
world,’ forever after lost to him and his.” Here, much as with Rousseau,
Négritude emphasized the losses inherent in European modernity and civi-
lization, in the move toward complex societies and increased cerebreality.
Blackness remained, by contrast, all that had, in such movements “forward”
been left behind. Such a move, if only for a brief moment, rocked the “white
man backward . . . as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United
States, ‘Th e presence of the Negroes besides the whites is in a way an insur-
ance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too
mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human
sustenance’ ” (BSWM, 129).
Th e victory was, however, fl eeting. Although “rummag[ing] through the
antiquity of the black man” demonstrated that Fanon “belonged to a race
that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago”
and that knew how to “build houses, govern empires, erect cities, mine
for metals, weave cotton, forge steel,” previous Negro civilizations, however
grand and anticipatory, did not confer patents of humanity on contempo-
rary black people nor guide them through the present moment (BSWM,
225). What is more, even in such civilized forms, blackness here occupied
the place of the species’ infancy, Europe’s prehistory—something for which,
from the distance of transcendence, one could feel a fond aff ection. Fanon
writes, “I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in
big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children—to the inno-
cent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. . . . You are so real in your life—so
funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite
civilization and let us relax, bend to those heads, those adorably expressive
faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (BSWM, 132). Th e very
transparency that Rousseau sought is here reinscribed in the most patron-
izing of terms. Perhaps worst of all, Fanon’s unreason was countered with
“real reason” (ibid.) revealing Négritude in its relativity (BSWM, 133), as a
dependent point of comparison with the terms it sought to counter.
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 73
when worlds of meaning are colonial worlds
Fanon, like Rousseau, revealed an evil that he has discovered, but his pur-
pose in portraying it was explicitly to clear the ground for its destruction.
Doing so required making use of scholarly resources, but ones, he suggested,
that had been colonized. Not only was reason never wholly independent,
abstract, or apolitical, it was also necessarily part of the meaningful world of
empire, one that sought to make human beings determined and predictable,
rather than contingent creatures who could will for things to be otherwise.
Fanon sought in describing these phenomena and dilemmas to make oth-
ers also feel them. What led some to call his BSWM eclectic exemplifi ed
for others precisely the improvisational attitude necessary to capture the
multi dimensionality of human lived experience. Fanon writes, “What are by
common consent called the human sciences have their own drama. Should
one postulate a type for human reality and describe its psychic modalities
only through deviation from it, or should one not rather strive unremit-
tingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man?”
Like Rousseau, Fanon was concerned about the ways in which the sup-
posed authoritativeness of some brands of empiricism, of dubiously col-
lected facts, could block the larger project of understanding human beings,
obscuring the clarifying of what it was, in fact, that we should be endeavor-
ing to understand. If with Rousseau, fact was pitted against right for the
sake of legitimating despotism, in Fanon, these were linked to problematic
hypotheses that naturalized and biologized racism, suggesting that feelings
of inferiority were lying dormant within black bodies, activated, not created
by colonization (BSWM, 99). Fanon emphasizes, “What matters for us is
not to collect facts and behavior, but to fi nd their meaning” (BSWM, 168).
In the absence of such meaning, one participates in “an endless task, the
cataloging of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every
line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of
incompleteness” (BSWM, 172).
Th is was achieved with the assistance of the mistaken pursuit of a particu-
lar brand of objectivity, one that tied rigor to rendering human beings mere
mechanisms without the agency that could introduce either contingency
or meaning into the social world or a capacity to undertake its deliberate
transformation. Fanon explicitly rejects this central tenet (and with it any
valorization of human beings as least corrupted when acting most instinc-
tively), that “lead[s] only in one direction: to make man admit that he is
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74 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
nothing, absolutely nothing—and that he must put an end to the narcissism
on which he relies in order to imagine that he is diff erent from the other
‘animals’ ” (BSWM, 22). Here we are reminded of Rousseau’s earlier chal-
lenge: whether what we might reveal under the name of “science” is not a
product of the very social forces that also make such investigations possible.
Fanon refuses to so surrender, “grasping [his] narcissism with both hands,
[he] turn[s] [his] back on the degradation of those who would make man a
mere mechanism” (BSWM, 23).
One might sum up Fanon’s reworking of the most central problems posed
by method in Rousseau in one of his closing Marxist pleas: “Th at the tool
never possess the man” (231). Indeed he prefaces the text in a spirit much like
the opening of Rousseau’s Second Discourse: “It is good form to introduce a
work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I
shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians. Th ere
is a point at which methods devour themselves. . . . I believe that the fact
of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psy-
choexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it” (BSWM, 12). In
spite of the exhaustiveness of much psychological literature, its authors of-
ten, in seeking lawlike rules and formulas, eliminated precisely what makes
the human subject peculiar. In so doing, such practitioners cloaked the very
contorted agency that Fanon sought to uncover in the most constrained of
conditions. As Peter Caws aptly described: “One convenient way of escap-
ing responsibility for unfortunate social facts (private property and wage
labor, for example) is to regard them as relations between people and things:
Th e capitalist is related to his property, so the expropriated worker vanishes
from the equation; the worker is related to his work, so the factory owner
similarly vanishes. Marx insists that both are disguised relations between
people and other people: Th e owner of private property deprives, and the
wage slave is enslaved to, human beings in fl esh and blood, not economic
abstractions” (1992, 296).
Race is one such abstraction, a key element in “an obdurate material so-
cial reality . . . which . . . reordered the world . . . [penning in the racially
subjugated] to an unwilled particularity” (2011, 53). Its effi cacy was reason for
special caution, to keep it from being “permitted to provide the fi nal vocab-
ulary for self-understanding and moral reasoning” to mask the “important
[and distinctly human preoccupations] beneath what is contingent” (53).
As Lewis Gordon describes, “In Fanon’s view, however universal the hostile
structures against black presence may be, we must also remember that all
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 75
of those structures are situationally lived by people of fl esh and blood” (45).
Just as fl esh and blood play an indispensable role in maintaining them, they
might choose not to. It is not that such a task is ever easy or certain, only
that recognizing our freedom and agency requires also seeing how we might
help to cement arrangements we would not devise. Such an attention to
responsibility, even when heavily mediated by institutional norms, extended
crucially to the role of scholar and writer. Fanon exhibited precisely this
orientation when he asked in “Th e North African Syndrome” (1967d, 3),
“Have I not, because of what I have done or failed to do, contributed to an
impoverishment of human reality? . . . Have I at all times demanded and
brought the man that is in me?”
Th e challenge with such a humanistic standard is that it is pursued within
imperial societies, those that in dominating others cannot avoid convincing
themselves of the latter’s rightful subordination. Fanon insists, “It is not
possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and
through. And racism is only the emotional, aff ective, sometimes intellectual
explanation of this inferiorization” (1967e, 40). Remarkably, the outcomes
are usually highly rational. Indeed, Fanon states plainly that the racist in a
culture with racism is normal, someone whose economic relations and other
ideas are in harmony. It follows that in colonial circumstances, those who
are antiracist are an aberration that cannot be treated as a rule. One cannot,
writes Fanon, require that men be against the “prejudices of [their] group,”
that they, through principles or abstract commitments, deliberately embrace
disharmony. To do so would be irrational. Avoiding treating racism as a con-
sequence of the “fl awless logic” of needing to rationalize one country draw-
ing its substance from another is to individualize relations overdetermined
by conquest and to seek behavior change that misses the more basic point
that within colonial circumstances (41), “Every Frenchman in Algeria is at
the present time an enemy soldier” (1967c, 81).
Processes through which conquered groups are made inferior rely cen-
trally on what Fanon calls deculturation. “[Th e] negative of a more gigantic
work of economic, and even biological, enslavement” (1967e, 31), the de-
valuing of language, dress, and culture of the oppressed is too consistent to
reduce to the behavior of individual psyches encountering the unfamiliar
(33). Involved instead—parallel with raids, expropriation and bloodshed—is
the systematic demolition of indigenous systems of reference. For in the
“sacking of cultural patterns,” is the “destructuring” of “social panoramas”
or of independent collective orientations and viable distinct points of view
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76 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
(ibid.). Fanon emphasizes: “Th e setting up of the colonial system does not
of itself bring about the death of the native culture. Historic observation
reveals, on the contrary, that the aim sought is rather a continued agony
than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture. Th is culture, once
living and open to the future, becomes closed, fi xed in the colonial status,
caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummifi ed, it testifi es
against its members. . . . Th e apathy so universally noted among colonial
peoples is but the logical consequence of this operation” (34). To reproach
colonized communities as “inert” is, in Fanon’s estimation, “utterly dishon-
est.” Settlers erect archaic institutions patterned after caricatured versions
of “formerly fertile institutions” (ibid.). Appearing to embody respect for
the “personality of the subjugated people,” these are “tantamount to utter
contempt . . . elaborate sadism” (ibid.). For “honoring culture” in such in-
stances is to practice ongoing mummifi cation that undercuts the possibility
of creating conditions that allow for open, permeable values “incarnated by
men.” Recognition here instead refl ects a deliberate eff ort “to confi ne, to
imprison, to harden” through a maximal objectifi cation and simplifi cation
that renders cultural confrontation impossible. What is rather achieved is a
juxtaposition of a colonial culture that is dynamic, growing, and coherently
structured against an amalgamation of curiosities, characteristics and habits,
decontextualized and without structure—the kind of “retentions” that, in
Nigel Bolland’s account, creolization seeks to avoid making the primary
representative of New World black cultures.
In such a cultural battlefi eld, generations of colonized people faced the
“choice” between “retraction of one’s being” into a contrived traditionalism
and a “frenzied attempt at identifi cation with the colonizer” (A Dying Colo-
nialism). It is only with the forceful positing of an alternative trajectory that
seeks to move beyond colonial stability, that the coordinates of complicit
cooperation and unilateral resistance will be dislodged and with it the in-
ability of colonized people to be sources of independent signifi cation who
can ascribe meaning to particularly symbolically charged cultural elements
from the head scarf to instances of Western medicine.
Fanon documented examples of work that while honestly studying co-
lonial societies in accord with existing standards of rigor was completely
divorced from an understanding of the real nature of such predicaments.
It is worth emphasizing that like W. E. B. Du Bois, Fanon did not take the
position that a subjective experience is the unique monopoly of any one
group. Indeed he writes, “it would give me no pleasure to announce that
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 77
the black problem is my problem and mine alone and that it is up to me to
study it” (BSWM, 86). It is precisely because such understanding is possible
that he off ers so scathing an assessment of Octavio Mannoni’s Prospero and
Caliban: Th e Psychology of Colonization.
It was not a question of what Mannoni had failed to gather. If anything,
it was his conception of objectivity that threatened to lead him into error.
As Fanon says of him, it seemed that he had “not tried to feel himself into
the despair of the man of color confronting the white man;” that he had
not grasped the dilemmas that we have begun to consider. It is clear, ob-
serves Fanon, that the Malagasy has only two choices: to be dependent or
suff er from an inferiority complex: either he stays in his place or he aspires
to assimilate and is rejected for doing so (BSWM, 93). While legitimately
concerned with redressing the shortcomings of earlier ethnographic work,
Mannoni, argues Fanon, proceeded in his own right to seal the Malagasy
into their own customs with their dependency on their ancestors and strong
tribal characteristics, deliberately ignoring that “since Gallieni, the Mala-
gasy had ceased to exist” (BSWM, 94). Indeed if Martians were to colonize
Earthlings—and Fanon emphasizes, “not to initiate them into Martian cul-
ture but to colonize them”—we would be doubtful of the persistence of
“any earth personality” (BSWM, 95). Herein lies Fanon’s larger claim: where
colonization rather than simply domination is the aim, prior horizons and
psychological mechanisms are shattered. From this point forward, other
Malagasy cannot constitute a legitimate point of view, a defi ning other. It
is only colonizing eyes that bestow reality. However generous or humane
French pioneers may have been, this formed the structure of their arrival:
with it, one became French or disappeared. However, achieving French-
ness for the colonized was never fully possible. Without an analysis of this,
Fanon wrote, analyses like Mannoni’s were “condemned to falsehood, to
absurdity, to nullity” (BSWM, 97).
Not only failing to problematize how colonialism radically interrupted
symbolic worlds, Mannnoni also exhibited precisely the form of imperial
reasoning that we were just discussing, placing responsibility for their colo-
nization on the vanquished, suggesting their political fate was, in a sense,
welcomed. For Mannoni, after all, not all peoples could be colonized, only
those who experienced a need for dependency. Th e implication was that
wherever Europeans successfully founded colonies these outcomes had been
unconsciously expected or desired, even foretold in local legend. By contrast,
those who landed in the role of settlers were driven by an authority complex
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78 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
that led them constantly to seek to fl ee worlds of Others who had to be re-
spected and engaged. Wanting instead a world without men (BSWM, 108),
with creatures beneath their own status, they found those who sought in-
stead only to be obedient, in relations that satisfi ed all parties (BSWM, 99).
No, says Fanon: how can welcoming European guests and even suggesting
that their arrival was anticipated amount to the unconscious awaiting of a
white master? Th is conclusion could only be one overdetermined by ex post
facto outcomes and their conceptual arsenal.
Central to problematizing the way sciences were used to lend credibil-
ity and authority to exploitative projects was to rearticulate them as always
already enmeshed in political contestation. If Rousseau sought to illumi-
nate the decadence of eighteenth-century France by juxtaposing it with the
“savage” conceived as its prehistory, Fanon, as Nelson Maldonado Torres
(2008) has suggested, illuminates the human being and the human sciences
through the questions and circumstances in which subhumans are created.
Still, Fanon’s orientation toward scholars like Mannoni and to many of Eu-
rope’s leading philosophical minds—Freud, Lacan, Hegel, and Sartre—was
not one of reaction. He drew on these theories where illuminating at the
same time as pointing out where they in fact became particular or where
they failed to realize that what they described of elements of the life world
of Europe did not extend to its underside. But, Maldonado Torres insists,
this was far more profound than a relativist upsurge and in this sense not
the equivalent of the Négritude that Fanon had embraced and then chal-
lenged. Th e aim was not to point out that what “may be valid ‘there’ in
the territory of the colonizer” was “not ‘here’ in the territory of the colo-
nized.” Instead it was to reveal the codependence and mutual reliance of the
two in ways that most scholarship obscured by exposing a double world of
theorizing. Maldonado Torres states, “Dominant European approaches are
generally mistaken not only because they do not apply in the colonies, but
also, and more fundamentally, because they cannot even register how the
very condition of coloniality reveals another side of themselves” (2008, 99).
Th is brings me back to my discussion in Chapter 1 of the feat of re-
structuring an economy around colonies that remain absent from one’s
national narratives; of the triumph of divorcing what are framed as quint-
essentially Enlightenment ideals from the international slave and colonial
routes through which they spread through the globe. For Fanon the work
of intellectuals must be to unravel the terms that make these victories ap-
pear natural or inevitable. Th e colonial condition therefore is, as Maldonado
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 79
Torres writes, a fundamental “axis of refl ection” since it is within the colo-
nial condition that “humanity itself produces its opposite . . . it serves as a
referent to test the radicalism of ways of thinking and behaving that aim to
give expression to what is most distinctively human” (2008, 100). In other
words, against Rousseau, for Fanon, the colonized person is not a key sub-
ject of study because somehow untouched. It is precisely the opposite: It is
in the relation of the colonizer to the colonized and the worlds that erupt
between them that we begin to understand what becomes of the human be-
ing in the modern world and what, under such circumstances, can be done
to and with freedom.
forging methodological alternatives
Th e implications of this are not, however, as is so frequently assumed, par-
ticular to one or even most communities of color. No, the liberation of the
person of color is inseparable from the rearticulation of the project of all
humankind, from forging a decolonial humanism. As I have already stated,
racial identities are coconstituting, making little sense in isolation from one
another. Th e project of unraveling their structure therefore demands medi-
tations on reason and the uses to which it has been put through a dialectical
demonstration of how one studies and understands what it is to live in a
multiracial world in which the singular normative standard is white. Much
like Rousseau, Fanon’s orienting skepticism to the spirit and aims of most of
the social scientifi c work that surrounded him formed the basis for his own
methodological innovations. To illuminate his predicament, Fanon must
take the reader through stages of failed eff orts to live with dignity without
undertaking the more fundamental project of “restructuring the world.” Th e
neat application of methods derived from the natural sciences and even the
resources of brands of philosophy that are tone deaf to the cultural speci-
fi city of the worlds out of which they emerged cannot be adequate for ex-
ploring the nature of such ambiguities and how it is that they are suff ered
through. Colonial worlds like racist ones are in fact highly rational, with
rules and logics that are discerned and negotiated. Fanon’s aim here, as with
Rousseau, is not simply for one to register the logical cogency of what is
said, but to be moved by it in ways that alter one’s relationship to the people
and world around one.
Fanon had found for all his eff orts to be a good tactician, aiming to
rationalize the world and show white men and women how they “were
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80 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
mistaken,” victory was elusive. Even as scientists reluctantly conceded that
black people were human with the same morphology and histology as oth-
ers, with a heart on the left side, the concession was highly abstract. As
Fanon put it, “on certain points the white man remained intractable. Under
no condition did he wish any intimacy between the races, for it is a truism
that [race] mixing lowers the physical and mental level, should be avoided
until we understand it better” (BSWM, 119–20). Fanon described this result
as making clear that he had to change his tune; the victory of reason played
cat and mouse with and made a fool of him. Truth itself, perhaps here part-
ing from Rousseau, could not be apolitical. As Nigel Gibson writes, “Indeed
the colonized can respond only to the living lie of colonialism with another
lie. Th e colonizers are liars because they refuse to tell the truth. For Fanon,
by this denial the colonized remain true to themselves. Fanon claimed no
Truth; truth was commitment—truth was to take a stand against the op-
pressive ‘reality’ ” (2011b, 7). He does not, however, as some Négritude
writers might have it, pose against this a black truth, but instead aims to
dismantle the entanglement of truth and race or the politics of truth in a
colonial context (ibid.). Without such reconstruction, objectivity is always
directed against the colonized.
While we have seen that he introduced his fi rst published book with an
explicit challenge to method, with problematizing how one undertakes en-
deavors of inquiry through emphasizing the uniqueness of human being, it
would be misleading to suggest that Fanon’s inquiries were then method-less.
Having initially submitted the text that became Black Skin, White Masks as a
thesis to complete his medical school training entitled, “Essay for the Disa-
lienation of the Black,” he was met with discouragement: Writes Ehlen,
“Th eir idea of a clinical study did not entail observing one’s own subjective
conscious reactions and extrapolating these to a generalized pathology . . .
furthermore Fanon’s ideas of racial psychology were far too radical to be
appreciated by a standard psychiatric faculty in 1950” (2000, 97–98). While
initially disappointed, he quickly revised the manuscript as a book that he
submitted for publication by Seuil, choosing another topic for his thesis.
At the time, it was determined that he would need a preface for the book
as he was not much known outside of Lyon. His fi rst choice was Francois
Jeanson, then twenty-nine and a contributing editor to Les Temps Modernes.
Jeanson, as recounted in his afterward to the 1965 Seuil edition, later relayed,
“Having found [Fanon’s] manuscript exceptionally interesting, I committed
the error of telling him so” (Ehlen 2000, 102). When Fanon indignantly
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 81
replied, “You mean, for a Negro, it isn’t so bad,” Jeanson showed Fanon to
the door which increased Fanon’s respect for him. Th e two became lasting
friends.
Today some view the work as juvenile (Cherki 2006, 25); others at the
time of publication and subsequently found it opaque, diffi cult to categorize
in terms of genre (Macey 2002,160–61), or too reliant on psychoanalyti-
cal literatures to make for comfortable or easily digestible reading (ibid.).
Macey, drawing on Lévi-Strauss, decribed it as an exercise in bricolage, a
term “used to describe how myths are assembled from the material that are
at hand: the word literally means ‘do it yourself ’” (162); in this case, drawing
from the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the Négritude writ-
ers, the psychiatry in which he had just trained forging syntheses that some
call “seamless” (Henry 2005) and others as “far from being smooth” (Macey
163). Aiming not only at elucidating particular arguments but at moving
his readers, Fanon proceeds at both philosophical and psychoanalytical lev-
els, in what Paget Henry has called a “complex and synthetic methodology”
(2005, 96), that Maldonado Torres describes as “a transdisciplinary endeavor
that requires the reformulation and reconfi guration of existing disciplines
and the creation of new ones” (2008, 129). Henry Louis Gates observes, “It
may be a matter of judgment whether his writings are riven with contradic-
tions or richly dialectical, polyvocal and multivalent. Th ey are in any event
highly porous to interpretation [so that] the readings they elicit are . . . of
unfailing interest” (2010, 86).
Few who seriously engage it do not emphasize what he called his “so-
ciogenic” analyses. Rather than off ering a portrait of the origin of the spe-
cies as we saw in Rousseau, these analyses aimed to elucidate the constitu-
tion of meaning by emphasizing the coconstitution of social structures and
individual choices in the larger rejection of the view that societies can be
studied like inert beings and that tried in its very approach to the human
subject to capture our features—multidimensional and free, even if highly
determined.
If Rousseau’s primary concerns were with the curbing of freedom and ero-
sion of morality, Fanon makes liberation his fi rst philosophy (Maldonado
Torres 2008, 130). He writes, “I will say, however, that every criticism of
that which is implies a solution, if indeed one can propose a solution to
one’s fellow—to a free being. What I insist on is that the poison must be
eliminated once and for all” (Maldonado Torres 2008, 62). It was erroneous
to distinguish among or rank forms of exploitations since all were applied
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82 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
“against the same ‘object’: man.” Exploring their structure abstractly was
to “turn one’s back on the major, basic problem, which is that of restoring
man to his proper place” (BSWM, 88).
Although Fanon suggests that he had waited for his ideas to cease smol-
dering before writing them down, since he wanted neither to hurl them nor
ignite fervor (which brings fi re, famine, and contempt for man and is the
weapon of the impotent), he does write in a way that he ascribes to Jean-
Paul Sartre of “[grabbing] you by the guts” (BSWM, 228), so that to reveal
is the beginning of the process of annihilating what is described (BSWM,
2–3). It would be dishonest, he writes early on (BSWM, 86), to pretend that
he is objective, if objectivity presumes an orientation of aff ective neutrality.
He describes his own text as a “mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in
which it will be possible to discern the Negro on the road to disalienation”
(BSWM, 184).
Fanon therefore suff used his studies with the touch of the human
subject.
It is remarkable that much has been said about the lyrical quality of the
writing of both Rousseau and Fanon. Commentators like Peter Gay have
suggested that Rousseau “wrote too well for his own good”; Fanon’s writing,
many said, could not leave one unchanged. In fact, both men, considered
two of the best writers in the canon of political theory, composed in much
the same way: through dictation. Rousseau often froze with pen in hand.
He would compose easily as he strolled or craft and recraft sentences and
paragraphs in his head when enduring yet another night’s insomnia. In the
morning, Th erese Levasseur’s mother (his mother-in-law of sorts) would
take it all down. Fanon also would speak aloud as he paced, while his wife
Josie typed, trying to capture “the rhythm of a body in motion and cadences
of the breathing voice” (Cherki 2006, 27). When Jeanson had suggested
that Fanon clarify a particular phrase, Fanon replied, “I cannot explain that
phrase more fully. When I write things like that, I am trying to touch my
reader aff ectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me,
words have a charge. I fi nd myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word,
the vertigo of a question mark” (quoted in Macey 2002, 159). He went on
to say that, like Césaire, he wanted “to sink beneath the stupefying lava of
words that have the color of quivering fl esh” (ibid.). Cherki writes, “Th e
profound singularity of this work, its subject matter notwithstanding, arises
from the writing itself. Its originality follows from its urgency to convey an
experience by going one-on-one with words . . . [he] wished to write inside
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 83
the sensory dimension of language in order to give rise to a new way of
thinking that would depend on something more than conceptual jockey-
ing” (2006, 27). In other words, what both sought to convey was better
communicated through spoken language, through bringing the reader into
a living conversation, with the urgency and precision absent in the quiet
composure of the individual study. Writing in such a way embodied a form
of invitation. One could not simply put the text down and ponder. Instead
the work awaited one’s answer, one’s contribution to an unfolding and open
discussion.
For Fanon, this off ered an alternative form of education, one that sought
“to teach the Negro not to be the slave of their archetypes” (BSWM, 35).
He refl ected, “Th e white world, the only honorable one, barred me from
all participation. [I] was expected to behave like a black man—or at least
like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and was told to stay within
bounds, to go back where I belonged” (114–15). To the crippled man who
advised Fanon’s brother to resign himself “to [his] color” the way he had
adapted to his stump (140), Fanon refused. He therefore would also tell the
drawn and quartered Martinican man of comparison that it was the envi-
ronment that was responsible for his delusion. Th e obvious implication?
Simply stated, “the end of the world” (216) or, in actual fact, of this and
other worlds constructed around the preservation of overly constrained false
dilemmas. Fanon would say much the same to the waiting lighter skinned
black women who sought to transform her condition by ascending the hi-
erarchy of pigmentations: this is not a personal fl aw best responded to with
moralism; instead, “another solution is possible” (82).
Rather than acting out the inevitable, in what simultaneously constituted
“normality” and “failure,” the answer was to eradicate the foundational terms
of the dilemma (BSWM, 100). Fanon writes, “Th ere are two ways out of this
confl ict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want
them to be aware of it. I try then to fi nd value for what is bad. Th e other is to
terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an un-
healthy, confl ictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman” (197). Th is
demanded rising above the “absurd drama that others have staged around
me,” “rejecting the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one
human being, to reach out for the universal” (ibid.). He, and by implication
other “Negroes” and white people would be disalienated as they refused to
seal themselves away “in the materialized Tower of the Past” (226). Th is in
turn meant rejecting the present as defi nitive (ibid.); of demanding human
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84 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
behavior from others and not renouncing freedom through one’s choices;
reminding oneself “that the real leap consists in introducing invention into
existence.” After all, Fanon refl ects, what “I wanted [was] to be a man among
other men . . . to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to
help build it together” (112–13).
Fanon is often described as the man who made a plea always to remain
someone who questions. Here was not only an orientation to the future but
also to every dimension of the present. Lewis Gordon has described Fanon
as having achieved this when it came to questions of inquiry, by making our
methods themselves a question. He does this in a way reminiscent of Rous-
seau: If colonization leaves nothing untouched, determining not only race,
gender, class, and ethnic relations but also how time and space, the sacred
and profane are understood, if, in other words, colonization is a form of cul-
tural life with its own distinctive and self-protecting logic, how could it fail,
in a most determining way, to shape the epistemic conditions of social life
as well? How could one assume that methods, procedures through which re-
search projects are designed and expected to be pursued and evaluated, could
remain untarnished by its brush? How could they do so and still be meaning-
ful or even comprehensible to those who would undertake and read them?
Still, for Fanon, to be capable of posing such questions affi rms that we can
remain self-refl ective, that we can ask about how independent our thought
manages to be so that we are not dogmatically duped robotically to replicate
racist rationalizations. As Fanon wrote, “Th e prognosis is in the hands of
those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure. . . .
Reality for once, requires a total understanding” (BSWM, 11).
pathologies of liberty
Indeed for Fanon, questions of mental health and sickness could not be
divorced from the social world of which they were a part; “mental disorders”
were therefore also a “pathology of liberty” (Bulhan 1985, 227), instances
in which the agency of human beings was distorted and self-destructive in
ways that could not be restored without altering their relations with oth-
ers. Even when not mechanistically their result, it was impossible for sick-
ness not to be expressed within the terms of meaning of the patient, not to
latch on to the coordinates of his or her social world. Psychiatry, as Fanon
emphasized in his resignation letter from Blida-Joinville, was the medical
technique that aimed to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his envi-
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 85
ronment. However, if in European societies, medicine was respected and
the doctor-patient relationship sacred, in the colonies Western medicine was
associated with the intensifi cation rather than the alleviating of pain (97).
Often, in North Africa, working for the army, doctors were seen as an ex-
tension of colonial intrusions. Still if depoliticized science may have been
impossible, science in the service of the people was not.
France had, as Macey emphasizes, conquered Algeria with a gun in one
hand and quinine in the other. Th e expeditionary force that landed east
of Algiers in 1830 included 167 surgeons and doctors. As towns fell to the
French, hospitals staff ed by military doctors popped up so that by 1876 even
the most remote tribal areas had resident military physicians. In addition to
prevention and cure, these men and women elaborated “the view of human-
ity from a racial standpoint,” sending their studies back to France contribut-
ing in important ways to perceptions of the new colonial subjects. Algeria
had proven to be home to two races: an Arab majority and a minority of
tribes, including the Kabyles who lived in the harsh mountains. Although
Fanon would defi ne “Algerian” ecumenically, subordinating ethnicity to a
nationalism of the will, French colonial discourse distinguished the “bad
Arab” from the “good Kabyle.” Th e former was the real focus of the Algiers
School that aimed from the earliest stages of conquest to explain the “Arab
mentality” in terms that slipped between metal pathology and ethnic psy-
chology. As Phillipe Lucas and Jean-Claude Vatin put it in the introduction
to an important anthology of anthropological writings on Algeria, “What
mattered was not so much the native himself, but what would be said about
him. Th e Algerian disappeared behind his appearance, behind the image of
him that the colonial majority wanted to give of him” (quoted in Macey
2002, 219). Fanon summed up the way that Algerians were encountered in
hospitals in the French world as bearing “the dead weight of all his com-
patriots” (226), spontaneously submerged within pre-existing frameworks.
European psychiatry’s history in Algeria was longer and more sustained than
in most other African colonies, largely due to the degree of penetration
of French settlements there. One result was an early presence of Alge-
rians suff ering mental disorders in France. Sent to asylums, systematized
observations of them soon emerged. Th ese moved from suggesting that the
colonized had no culture to the claim that they ranked at the bottom of a
hierarchy of distinct cultures. Early psychological accounts were of primi-
tive creatures that were primarily vegetative and instinctual, prone to act in
hordes, with infantile curiosities (Bulhan 1985, 220).
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86 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
When Fanon came to Algiers, he encountered the theories and practices
of the Algerian School of Psychiatry, one counterpart of a larger pattern of
colonial powers employing behavioral scientists to explain the psyche of
the colonized which, in Bulhan’s words, “often just gave scientifi c trappings
to prevailing bigotry” (1985, 228). In this they were not unique, of course,
but instead one wing of a larger, global project. Stephen Jay Gould’s (1996)
Th e Mismeasure of Man documents a whole US culture in which authorita-
tive and excellent science was that which legitimated hierarchical ordering
schemes that guided and rationalized genocidal policies and then those of
enslavement. Fanon described a unique malaise produced by institutional
racism that resulted in an inability of standard medical practitioners to treat
the oppressed. Doubting the veracity of their illness based on their vague
and amorphous complaints, the doctor usually patronized his patients, rely-
ing on and buttressing prevailing stereotypes.
To assure that science and reason were not simply additional instru-
ments of imperial endeavors, and that his work, as chef-du-service was not
so complicit, Fanon attempted to understand the symbolic life of colonized
communities, to be suffi ciently saturated by an understanding of local con-
ditions that he might be productive. From the start, however, here breaking
with subsequent work in ethnopsychiatry, Fanon assumed that “culture”
could not be treated apolitically. Much research of this kind followed the
logic I mentioned in my earlier discussion of Trouillot’s account of the “sav-
age slot.” In it, researchers sought out remote societies to generate evidence
to settle internal European debates. First with Dr. R. Lacaton on the ques-
tion of the meaning of confession and then Dr. François Sanchez on distinct
conceptions of madness and their implications for treatment, by contrast,
Fanon undertook to grasp the ways in which the experience of the oppressed
was informed by politically antagonistic conceptions of their situation.
Fanon insisted that one could not understand how people negotiated and
attempted to make sense of colonial situations without seeing them as ones
that pitted groups against one another, constantly testing their allegiances.
Such conditions fostered extensive mutual incomprehension. Few began
with Fanon’s conclusion: that a normal black child growing up in a nor-
mal family “will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white
world” (BSWM, 143).
When Fanon had fi rst arrived at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, he
instituted a range of radical changes that some have described as literally un-
chaining existing patients. Much as with his political writing, his approach
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 87
to psychotherapy was an eclectic combination governed by the larger, un-
compromised aim of being effi cacious. Blending psychoanalytic psychother-
apy, behavioral therapy, and existentialist-oriented psychotherapy, doctors
took active and involved roles, using both individual and group methods
and socio-drama in which a patient recounts personal experiences to others
who off er their responses. Patients did not pay the therapist since this modi-
fi ed the quality of transference and countertransference and every eff ort
was made to minimize the prisoner-jailer quality of traditional approaches
that attenuated sadomasochistic relations through confi nement and isola-
tion in which patients might aim to make of themselves the objects that
those who controlled their conditions sought. Instead, Fanon tried always
to move toward meetings of two free people. He therefore removed barbed
wire surrounding the facility, desegregated the wards, removing images of
Paris in leisure rooms that were supposed to suggest a sense of “home” to
patients who had never wandered through the Champs Elysées, and created
mechanisms to foster direct participation in particular forms of decision-
making. A newspaper was instituted, as were soccer teams. Always closest
to his interns and indigenous nurses, Fanon remained fi rmly committed to
the being of the patient and to aiming to restore freedom where it had been
lost: undermined psychologically by anxieties, obsessions, and inhibitions
and socially through victimization, rejection, and coercion. He assumed
throughout that the function of medicine was to make men at home in their
environments and that the purpose of social structures was to serve men’s
needs (rather than driving them to desperation).
Still, Fanon found that such humanistic innovations, ones with which
he had become familiar during his training, were far more eff ective with
European women patients than with Algerian men. Some of this was a func-
tion of linguistic barriers: with the latter, Fanon worked through translators,
mainly Algerian male nurses, but some was the error of assuming that what
had worked with the pioneering Catalan psychologist François Tosquelles
during Fanon’s residency in Saint Alban in central France would be appro-
priate in this rather diff erent context. After a year of work, he realized that
he would have to be “timid and attentive” in his eff orts to understand the
situation of native patients.
As examples, Fanon described the moment when a colonized person had
committed a crime and needed to be judged. He argued that the nature of
their confession could not be understood without qualifi cation: normally,
in confession, a person takes individual responsibility for their wrong doing,
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88 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
affi rming the values that he or she has violated in this individual act, and in
the act of apology gives the ransom for his or her reinsertion in the group.
But where oppression enters, such confessions are largely coerced. Even
when they are not, the reciprocal recognition, which underpins their eff ec-
tive logic and meaning, is absent. Th e verdict and what follows, however,
can be neither just nor rehabilitative if the accused is unwilling to appropri-
ate the act, to accept the validity of the rules it has violated. But even more
important, why would he when he knows full well that he will not, cannot,
be “reinserted” into a community from which he is excluded? What if “the
crime” was, from the very start, a rejection of the condition of being mar-
ginalized in one’s own home?
Th e logic of the confession was one that assumed intact communities of
relative insiders and equals with shared rules and norms and similar under-
standings of what it meant to belong. Th ese analyses did not consider the
situation of people suddenly shut out from the political community, whose
presence in the place they had always lived represented a form of crime.
If they were to accept the conditions and norms of the prevailing society,
what they in fact conceded to was the acceptability of their nonbelong-
ing. What, in such circumstances, becomes of innocence and guilt, or the
pursuit of justice? What is the person who must negotiate such a system to
conclude about his or her own “liberties”? As Renault has commented, “Th e
objectivity of values is illicitly translated by the colonizer into a legitimiza-
tion of domination . . . Telling the truth is showing allegiance to those who
hold them in their power” (2011, 109). Th e colonized will not confess in the
presence of the colonizer, then, not because he is primitive or illogical, but
because true and false both turn on a logic to which he is opposed. It is in
the colonial context therefore that he learns to lie. Before the struggle for
independence, truth consists in retraction and unqualifi ed rejection. In the
midst of it, the aim is to liberate appropriate truths, ridding them of their
colonial properties in acts of quasi-invention through which “one can bor-
row from Europe” if she is “provincialized” or creolized (111).
With madness, Fanon and Sanchez insisted that institutions for dealing
with it in the Muslim world predated any European counterparts. Th ese
were not, as so many writers claimed, communities living outside of his-
tory, brought willingly or against great odds, into its moving stream. In
such an act of Europe’s provincialization, they documented that within it,
madness was treated as a disease that alienated the victim from herself and
others but one for which the ill person was framed as responsible. Blamed
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 89
for its consequences, the mad woman was depicted as a social parasite who
exploited her illness for ill-begotten ends. North Africans, they explained
by comparison, saw the mad person as an innocent victim of spirits over
which he had no control. His situation was accidental and could happen
to anyone, since agency ultimately lay with the spirits who the community
together had to appease or confront. Th e affl iction was not confused with
the person and the remedy was a necessarily collective one in which respon-
sibility was shared.
For Fanon, in both instances, his aim was to correct European carica-
tures of North African behavior, to develop an approach appropriate to the
context within which he worked, to identify indigenous conceptions that
remained relevant to his own practice, and to combine these with eff ective
innovations that he observed elsewhere. He aimed, in other words, not to
miss the opportunities for human study not only made available by con-
tact with a diverse range of human communities but that followed from
the nature of colonial contact. What he exemplifi ed here, however, did not
only follow the rule of ethnology, but also his own creolized psychological
approach: As Bulhan states, “Th e colonialism of Europe did not confi ne
itself to economics or politics; it also permeated psychiatric concepts and
practices. Fanon therefore endeavored to pioneer a psychiatry of liberation”
that was appropriate to the needs and realities of his North African patients.
Th is required that he combine methods both foreign and local in a fusion
that met indigenous needs of challenging individual and collective unfree-
dom. In particular, it necessitated taking seriously that precolonial forms of
meaning remained, if petrifi ed and fragmented, and that recognizing the
existence of these was part of the process of recognizing the humanity of
the colonized. At the same time, to treat these as complete, rather than part
of a world that had been radically interrupted, would be equally problem-
atic. Th e people themselves had to negotiate this past in light of the larger
aim of altering their present circumstances so that they could reemerge as
meaning-making beings, responsible for the social and political world they
occupied.
It was in and through such orientations to research and practice that
Fanon eff ectively forged new methods. In Lewis Gordon’s terms, he engaged
in a “teleological suspension of disciplinarity” through which he was will-
ing to go beyond disciplinary conventions and rules (in both determining
legitimate questions and the execution of their answering) in the produc-
tion of knowledge, making tools of whatever proved most useful (Gordon
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90 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
2010a, 8). In other words, his scholarly aims were not to endear himself to a
community of people with the same credentials as he; to affi rm that he did
in fact belong and to off er up his writings as proof of deserved membership.
Instead, he was driven by the very questions at the heart of psychology and
psychiatry, so much so that he might use resources outside their brink to
illuminate and reenliven them.
In his Les Damnés de la terre or Wretched of the Earth (hereafter WE),
Fanon turns to an exploration of the context of colonial alienation, one
of political illegitimacy and coercively created and maintained inequalities.
Th ese are not simply those of masters and slaves whose relations are neces-
sarily manipulating and deceptive. Th ey describe instead the construction
of a Manichean world, what one violently divided in two—one strongly
built of stone and steel in which garbage disappears and people, white and
foreign, are well-nourished with covered feet; the other densely populated
by people who are dark and hungry, who seem to crouch with envy—does
to human relationships. Th is is precisely the culture of dependence that
Rousseau condemns but here theorized through imagining what Karl Marx
(1976, part 8) later called the fi rst moment of primitive accumulation, not as
a singular, precursory moment but extenuated, as Rosa Luxemburg argued
(2004, 32–70), to defi ne global relations created through colonization and
enslavement.
Fanon off ers a phenomenological portrait of both sides, of what it means
to see oneself as bringing values and civilization to outposts and backwaters,
as making history, creating an epoch, embodying an absolute beginning and
what, in contrast, it means to be treated as “a negation” of or “the enemy” of
values, as corrosive, a deforming element that disfi gures all that is beautiful
or moral; what it is to be the telos toward which others hope to move, to de-
fi ne the terms of their development and what, in contrast, it is to be referred
to in zoological terms, as reptilic, stinking, and gesticulating within what
many would think, if left uninterrupted, would have remained a prehistoric
vacuum. Th ese depictions are rich accounts of the very kind of relations
that Rousseau insisted made perceiving shared conditions of well-being, a
general will, impossible, where instead the right of the strongest prevailed
through which some enriched themselves clearly at the expense of others
and maintained their ability to do so through brute, ongoing force. How
could these Manichean poles meet to discuss anything shared? Th e thought
of the possibility is patently absurd—under the guise of order and peace,
this is, as Rousseau said of slavery, in fact a protracted state of war.
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 91
Fanon adds insight to Rousseau’s claim on the one hand that there is no
right to slavery and that the slave should escape as soon as he or she could
and on the other that slavery creates “natural slaves” or habituates people
to a set of conditions that make their legitimate exit extremely diffi cult to
achieve. While underscoring the form and nature of these constraints, that
one risks death and humiliation if one aims to challenge the coordinates of
a Manichean world, Fanon writes that the “native admits no accusation,”
that he is “overpowered but not tamed,” “treated as an inferior, but not
convinced of his inferiority” (WE, 53). He lives in a permanent dream to
switch places, with the basic insight that “the showdown [between the colo-
nizer and colonized] cannot be put off indefi nitely” (ibid.). Until such time,
however, members of the colonized community do live with an anger that
is perpetually lit—with sensitivity at the surface of open skin that fl inches
from a caustic agent—without any outlet. Th e explosions are inevitable but
the targets the undeserving in battles that are ultimately displaced.
concluding comparisons
Both Rousseau and Fanon tie their eff orts to explain unfreedom to the ori-
gins and causes of inequalities and the ways in which they alienate human
beings from themselves and each other. In doing so, both announce that
they set themselves at odds with prevailing conceptions of authoritative rea-
son that they demonstrate have been used far more to justify the curbing of
human liberty than to aid its deepening or expansion.
In revealing the ongoing toleration of what he considers as amounting to
despotism, Rousseau engaged in hypothetical reason that sought to distin-
guish what was original and artifi cial in man so we can see our natural selves.
Developing his feelings of being an outsider into an epistemological and
moral orientation from which critically to view his own and other European
societies, he aimed to be independent of (rather than reliant on) the trap-
pings of his social world. First endeavoring to write from an earlier moment
in political time, then taking on, to the best of his abilities, the position
and voice of nature, he elevated precisely those who were denigrated, put-
ting in their mouths his own feelings and estimations, suggesting that they
were able, because unencumbered by societal expectations and moldings,
to transcend what the highest exemplifi cations of European reason could
fathom. In doing so, he drew repeatedly on travel writings that he otherwise
criticized to mobilize the evidence he ascribed to “earlier,” less corrupted
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92 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
peoples and their counterparts in the Hispano- and Francophone colonies,
as seeing through the supposedly inarguable allure of European modernity
and civilization. Th e utter disinterest in grappling with these moments of
rejection was symptomatic of a more profound unwillingness to see global
exploration as an opportunity to understand humankind through engaging
with their continuities and diff erences and through them the relationship of
the contingent to the more permanent. Instead what most travelers keenly
perceived were opportunities for personal enrichment, whether in the form
of literal gold or its spiritual counterpart in potential converts.
While Rousseau inverted the usual value assigned to “primitives,” be-
cause he was himself wedded to a singular developmental trajectory through
which he aimed to show the radicality of human transformation through
the emergence of private property and complex unequal societies, Rousseau
ultimately framed these men and women as examples of man in his infancy.
We might feel nostalgia for the imagined distance we have traveled from
this way of being, but what are depicted as its living embodiments might
struggle to elicit sympathies given their supposed absence of complex, com-
parative thinking and reliance solely on instincts that cannot form the scaf-
folding of moral freedom. Th e alternative that they embody therefore cannot
be considered as a meaningfully articulated one but instead as a tragic, soon
marginal, symbolic rejection. While a refusal of a very radical kind, whether
because of Rousseau’s strong identifi cations with the dispositions of the an-
cients, sympathies with displaced aristocrats or trappings by the episteme
of his moment, he could not posit this as the basis for other courses of ac-
tion beyond a return that he conceded was not ultimately possible. He later
would try again in his Social Contract, still a highly ambivalent document,
that he characterized as his eff ort to square the circle.
Although Fanon did not explicitly engage Rousseau and Rousseauian ideas,
he was moved by similar orienting problems and concerns. In his hands,
however, these were suff used with hopes that he and subsequent generations
would make themselves agents of their times. What this meant was that
what literally sickened them was also that for which they were responsible.
Devoting themselves to revealing its multiple valences and coordinates was
not separable from trying to do something about it. Like Rousseau, Fanon
turned to the colonized, but not to point out that they too were human
thankfully still relatively untouched. Instead he illustrated that one cannot
disentangle the colonized from the colonial, that these make and are made
by each another, forged at once. For Fanon, there was nothing ideal about
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Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods 93
the lives of men and women whose lives were only recently interrupted by
the arrival of Europeans. Indeed, they only entered into the consciousness
of Europeans because their worlds had been so shattered. Th ey could not
return to a moment prior to this, although, as I will explore in further de-
tail in Chapter 4, many would try to do just that: to cope through fi nding
refuge in a petrifi ed version of the precolonial past. Such men and women
were, however, never without history and culture or political confl icts over
how best to live collectively. Framing them as such, even if in the most posi-
tive terms, obscured precisely that which was at work since it mistook the
very processes that pushed people toward their own mummifi cation for that
which supposedly precipitated their entry into historic time.
Waging such critiques and fashioning alternatives could not abandon
resources of reason and scholarship, even if these still needed to be held
in suspicion, precisely because, as noted by Bulhan, worlds of colonialism
aimed, however imperfectly, to be total. In such circumstances, many of the
most essential questions—those of what happens to agency when its coordi-
nates are so overdetermined; when resisting colonialism can mean little more
than devoting one’s energies to resurrecting a world that is no longer—are
exactly those that are treated as settled starting points. However elusive the
workings of reason, engagements with them enrich the lives of human be-
ings, enabling us to explore that which we uniquely, as symbolic creatures,
might do and be.
Unlike Rousseau, then, for Fanon, moments of refusal and rejection,
while essential to nurturing the kind of self that can work with others to
forge legitimate political alternatives, remain those of negation that must
ultimately be surpassed. While his friend and interlocutor Jean-Paul Sartre
fi rst off ered this unwelcome conclusion to him, Fanon ultimately agreed
that he could not remain in the “night of the absolute” (BSWM, 133–34).
Although the turn to Négritude was necessary in a way that Sartre had failed
to grasp, he had to move through it to face his situation. More explicitly
and unambivalently than in Rousseau, integral to Fanon’s theory is an ac-
count of how this is done, of how people not only refuse habituation but
seek to become the kinds of subjects that can create the political relations
they deserve. It is to these legitimate alternatives that I turn in the next two
chapters.
Although not intentionally, Fanon critically engages some of Rousseau’s
core ideas through creolizing them or by revisiting their problematics in
light of the contradictions of the world he magnifi ed as the unique situation
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94 Decolonizing Disciplinary Methods
of those seeking mental health within colonial conditions. In so doing,
Fanon takes them in directions in which Rousseau could not go himself.
Fanon creolizes these to the extent that he reemploys languages, concepts,
and aspirations borne of a much older European world (that was already
more diverse than conventional accounts would have it) and makes them
speak anew in grappling with challenges that are fresh and familiar, distinc-
tive and broadly shared.
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95
3
Rousseau’s General Will
I had perceived everything to be radically connected with politics, and that, upon whatever
principles these were founded, a people would never be more than that which the nature of
the government made them.
—jean-jacques rousseau
Rousseau’s and Fanon’s interests in questions of method and inquiry, as I
have shown, were fundamentally tied to their diagnoses of illegitimate poli-
tics. For Rousseau, the possibility of an alternative was easier to envisage
than to realize. Still, trying to imagine people as we are and laws and institu-
tions as they might be, he off ered his eff ort “to square the circle” through
the idea of “the general will” the pursuit of which, he insisted, was the only
legitimate basis of government.
defining the general will
Rousseau made the general will famous and infamous in several fateful
strokes. Although a concept with a prior life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century French theological debates concerning the will of G-d to save all
men (Riley 1988; Rosenblatt 1997), Rousseau recast it in evocative terms that
have inspired, puzzled, and frustrated readers ever since. Th e centerpiece
of his social contract constituted his eff ort to outline philosophically what
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96 Rousseau’s General Will
could make politics something other than masked force and a citizenry,
people, and body politic out of an amalgamation of individuals. Key to it
was the conjoining of two of the most relevant categories for modern and
contemporary politics, the general and the will. Between what Patrick Ri-
ley (1988) has called the “minute particulars” and the universal, the general
is appropriate to the domain of the polis rather than the kosmopolis. It is
and must be limited by permeable and shifting boundaries. As opposed
to both a reifi ed particularity that would fi x its borders as stone and to the
search for an absolute, limitless universality, the general seeks within certain
bounds to integrate meaningfully abiding diff erences. And to do so with the
full recognition that generalities are always multiple and dynamic because
politics itself turns on how thinking, decisions, and activity emerge out of
variegated collectivities.
Th e need for political life, after all, is born from the unique features of
what it is and means to be a human being. We are, as Aristotle observed,
distinct from both gods and beasts: We feel and think in ways that are in-
formed by but not reducible to our instincts. We can recognize cravings or
even yearnings without looking at their evidence in actions already under-
taken. For the divine, action is neither a unique domain nor challenge of
life; to have a thought is to bring it into being. We, by contrast, are able
to imagine meanings of justice, reason, and generality, all of which Rous-
seau claims emanate from the gods, but cannot translate them straightfor-
wardly into rules for living. If we were like gods, we would need neither law
nor politics. If we were no diff erent from nonhuman animals, to seek these
would be patently absurd.
But we are deluding ourselves, Rousseau argues at the start of his Dis-
course on Political Economy, if we compare our leaders with idealized fathers.
Th e people who rule over us have no innate reason to love us. Th ey may
actually delight in our misery. It is highly unlikely that they feel any impulse
for our care. If they do experience any guidance or direction as instinctive,
they must actively root it out (Rousseau 1987, 113). It would be disastrous for
them to consider the polity as their family only enlarged. Political leadership
is necessarily and distinctively unnatural.
And so we begin with one of the many sober requirements of political
life. We may not try to enter or inhabit it as underdeveloped children under
the care of a nurturing father who is ultimately responsible for our actions.
It is just as misleading to imagine political adulthood as an option that we
might refuse. We, as adults, are already elements of a single body the health
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Rousseau’s General Will 97
and life of which depend on fi guring out how it relates to itself. For col-
lective self-rule or popular sovereignty begins with a formal commitment
to root out theocentric and hereditary conceptions of authority in search of
more egalitarian alternatives. It turns the gaze to the ruled, the subjects, and
attempts to make explicit that within these regimes they, or we, are the only
resources available. Th is, in turn, makes collective life a project and a ques-
tion rather than a task with a preordained design or ready outcome.
Rousseau claimed in the Social Contract that we become moral through
the civil association that forms the body politic. If it were not so frequently
a site of abuse, he suggested, it would be blatantly obvious to us all that it is
through the body politic alone that we become intelligent beings and per-
sons, as opposed to limited beasts and slaves. But if we pursue popular sov-
ereignty in search of the conditions for the emergence of our own aspiration
for political right, we must ask: How can legitimacy emerge within political
life, from politics? We know how moral considerations or ethical concerns
can generate norms that we can adopt as ideals or standards for politics.
But what happens if we seek political legitimacy? What would it look like?
Would we recognize it? What would bring it into being?
Although generations of modern and contemporary political theorists
from Kant to Rawls and Habermas have asked these questions, they do
so within a terrain carved out by Rousseau, by one that defi ned the gen-
eral will, republicanism, and political legitimacy together. In Rousseau, the
general will, simply stated, is the refl ective expression or will of the people
as citizens considering the necessary grounds for their ongoing shared ex-
istence, for what has made possible and will sustain their transformation
from the aggregate they once were into “a public, moral person,” or body
politic. Authentic acts of the general will are therefore acts of sovereignty,
conventions of the body with each of its members based on the social con-
tract common to all and backed by their collective public force. Aiming at
the common good, general well-being, and common conservation, it is a
set of positions with which one cannot disagree without having been fun-
damentally misled. Tending toward equality, the general will is contrasted
with the will in general or the sum of the private interests and preferences of
individual men. It does not seek to eliminate these more particular interests
but frames them as secondary and subsidiary to a shared will that sustains a
domain of general life. Not then “some mystical faculty of a collectivity that
exists independently of the individual wills of its members” (Noone 1980
73), the general will is instead the basis for the achievement in political life
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98 Rousseau’s General Will
of a kind of freedom that requires a mutuality and reciprocality rooted in
consent that can be both given and retracted.
We may evade the general will. We can hide from its nagging expecta-
tions, pretending that they are themselves partial and particular. But it does
not die or disappear in such instances. Legitimacy and politics do.
elaborating the general will
We cannot know in advance if political legitimacy is, in fact, possible. We
can inquire into its nature. We might imagine its form. We may attempt
to foresee the challenges to its realization or the imperatives that it would
have to reconcile. But even our most penetrating written accounts still do
not themselves bring it into being. Its actual shape can only emerge out of
political life itself. And so Rousseau opens with the question, “I want to
inquire whether there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administra-
tion in the civil order . . . I will always try in this inquiry to bring together
what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility
do not fi nd themselves at odds with one another” (Rousseau 1987, 141). We
are equally uncertain about the purpose served by such theoretical consider-
ations. Rousseau states, “It will be asked if I am a prince or a legislator, that
I should be writing about politics. I answer that I am neither, and that is
why I write about politics. Were I a prince or a legislator, I would not waste
my time saying what ought to be done. I would do it or keep quiet” (141).
One writes about politics if doing so is not a substitute for other forms of
consequential action. One writes if one does not face a calculus of enacting
deeds or remaining in silence. Such refl ection is appropriate for free citizens
and members of a sovereign who can and should linger with the “oughts.”
Th at social orders are not natural is not a question for Rousseau, since,
he states without qualifi cation, they do not come from nature. Th ey are, how-
ever, in his words, “a sacred right,” and the foundation for all other rights.
Founded upon conventions arrived at without coercion, they are the only
formations through which right and justice can be pursued. Th e most se-
vere obstacles to their creation and sustaining are what Rousseau regards
as absurd conventions, which, mistaking custom with right, would have
us believe that some men possess natural authority over others or that the
obedience to the conqueror by the vanquished and enslaved is more than
merely prudent.
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Rousseau’s General Will 99
Th e “right” of the strongest, a primary example of what defi nes absurd
conventions, is also what most characterizes the political illegitimacy against
which governance by the general will is posited. Evident in familiar equa-
tions of sovereignty with force, Rousseau rejects this commonly held account
by emphasizing the fundamental insecurity of such misleading conceptions
of power. Explaining that the strength implied by potential violence can
never be strong enough to secure mastery unless it is able to transform itself
into something independently compelling, into that which elicits a sense of
duty from others. In its absence, if one can disobey the strong, one does so
legitimately. Rousseau writes, “Since the strongest is always right, the only
thing to do is to make oneself the strongest. Clearly then, this word ‘right’
adds nothing to force. It is utterly meaningless here” (Rousseau 1987, 143).
Obligation rests in a capacity to inspire more than the fear born of coer-
cion or terror. It is therefore also, at least potentially, more permanent since
linked to faculties beyond our basic instincts to survive.
Th is indictment of rule sustained only by threats or actual physical force
extends to its institutional instantiations in both slavery and colonization.
Both turn on relationships that require some—in losing their liberty, rights,
and duties—to renounce their dignity as people. To lack a free will is to
cease to be capable of moral action. Such an individual cannot be party
to any but a vain and null convention: One cannot, after all, commit to
someone from whom one can demand everything since even their right of
protest thereby belongs to another. Slavery and right are, for this reason,
contradictory and mutually exclusive (Rousseau 1987, 146). Th is extends
also to Rousseau’s insistence on the radical diff erence between subduing a
multitude through an act of colonization (which creates an aggregation)
and legitimately governing a society (which involves the creation of a body
politic that aims at a public good). In slavery and colonization, as with the
more general notion of the “right” of the strongest, peoples’ lives are made
up only of strategic calculations. Th ey presuppose the continuation of a
state of war and impossibility of the social life upon which politics is based
and to which it gives expression.
Th e desire to live less precariously through expanding one’s powers, if im-
possible to accomplish in a long-term way through ongoing physical domi-
nation, necessitates the challenge of political association. Th e unarticulated
wish underpinning all such projects is to be fully protected by everyone else
while obeying oneself as freely as before. Indeed Rousseau goes so far as to
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100 Rousseau’s General Will
see this clause as implicit in the act itself to such an extent that it would be
accepted everywhere by everyone. To fall short of it—which we, with any
but transformed selves, will inevitably do—is, without announcement or
warning, to return to a state of natural liberty.
It is in this context that Rousseau fi rst mentions the general will: “Each of
us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of
the general will and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the
whole” (Rousseau 1987, 148; italics in the original). It is framed as the alter-
native—to the state of nature, to cycles of the “right” of the strongest—to
our situation under illegitimate governments. Without some artistry, there
is a tendency for all relations to collapse into sheer contests of willful force.
What sustains any- and everything else is the possibility of a less fragile reci-
procity. Rousseau writes:
Th e fi rst and most important consequence of the principles established
above is that only the general will can direct the forces of the state ac-
cording to the purpose for which it was instituted, which is the com-
mon good. For if the opposition of private interests made necessary the
establishment of societies, it is the accord of these same interests that
made it possible. It is what these diff erences have in common that forms
the social bond, and, were there no point of agreement among all these
interests, no society could exist. For it is utterly on the basis of this com-
mon interest that society ought to be governed. (Rousseau 1987, 153)
Antagonistic, competing interests of individuals and families create diffi cul-
ties for which the formation of societies appears to off er a solution. Actually
to form these draws on the accord above or beneath these warring interests,
on the shared desire for amelioration through organized association. In this
sense, all states are instituted to pursue a good that is common. To retain
this founding purpose, the general will must direct their forces. It is what
the diff erences have in common and undergirds social bonds. It must fur-
nish the basis for governance.
To forge the polity demands what Rousseau’s critics fi nd most alarming:
“the total alienation of each of us to the entire community.” How could such
a radical move not be disastrously dangerous?
Rousseau off ers: if everyone gives himself entirely, the condition placed
on all is equal. If any rights were retained with private individuals, some
among them would remain as private judges distinct from the polity. What
is more, in giving myself to a unit of which I am a part, I give myself to
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Rousseau’s General Will 101
myself and to no individual, particular person. What is more, as part of the
political whole, fundamentally implicated by it, I cannot wish for others
what I would not for myself. Th is prescription therefore unites individuals
into a single body making infl iction of isolated harm impossible.
Th is further encourages people in both their capacities, as members of
the body and men, to be moved by both duty and interest to come to each
other’s aid. Th e aim, in other words, from its very foundation, is to create a
palpable sense of unity—in which I am aff ected similarly to you and we are
all mutually implicated—that is a living, rather than purely formal reality
to members. What they together form through the act of convention is the
state when passive, the sovereign when active. We act as citizens when part
of the sovereign people who make law through articulating the general will.
We are subjects when we make these our guides. We therefore live politically
with both public and private selves the diff erent directions of which we are
to hold together.
Following the initial act of convention, Rousseau does state that nothing
can be demanded of individuals that is not of use to the community and
that what is not can be disposed of at will. Indeed Mark Cladis has recently
argued that the line that Rousseau draws between the public and private
spheres, between what may be demanded and regulated and what left alone,
continues to be a useful guide for thinking about religious rights in the
United States and abroad (Cladis 2003).
When people who once lived in the state of nature enter the political
community in the writing of Th omas Hobbes or John Locke, it is their
situation rather than they who are transformed. Th ey continue, in the
former, to be as vainglorious as before but now making their predictably
self- interested calculations with the leviathan’s potentially punitive hand
in mind. Th ey persist, in the latter, in their rational industriousness but
now knowing that there are courts of law that will contend impartially with
beastlike trespassers. With Rousseau, as evident in chapter 8 of Book I, the
story is rather diff erent. Th rough forming a polity we are transformed from
stupid and limited, if highly independent, animals into intelligent beings.
When living within polities “the voice of duty replaces physical impulse and
right replaces appetite . . . man, who had hitherto taken only himself into
account, fi nds himself forced to act upon other principles and to consult
his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although in this state he de-
prives himself of several of the advantages belonging to him in the state of
nature, he regains such great ones. His faculties are exercised and developed,
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102 Rousseau’s General Will
his ideas are broadened, his feelings are ennobled” (Rousseau 1987, 150–51).
However, Rousseau adds an important cautionary note here also in the spirit
of Aristotle: when political relations are abused, this elevation of our souls is
not only absent but inverted, lowering us, as was evident at the close of the
Second Discourse, beneath our natural status.
Rousseau adds, in a very diff erent tone than the one through which he
introduced himself and his work to public life: “To the proceeding acquisi-
tions could be added the acquisition in the civil state of moral liberty, which
alone makes man truly the master of himself. For to be driven by appetite
alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is
liberty” (Rousseau 1987, 151). We are freed through collective life since it
alone can set the conditions through which we could again become masters
of ourselves now through authoring the laws under which we live. Th is
moral liberty or legislative power extends beyond freedom from constraint
or negative and natural liberty to the freedom to determine how we should
relate to one other, how to secure the political equality that makes liberty
meaningful, how to foster and maintain a form of society that might be the
site through which we transcend alienation from ourselves and others.
If legitimate governments are those in which the general will directs the
body politic, what is it? Rousseau off ers several coextensive defi nitions.
First and perhaps most obviously, the general will, as we have already
mentioned, conjoins willing, which is focused on active self-determination,
with generality. It is what emerges when the whole community considers
questions as they pertain to the whole community. Rousseau writes, “Sov-
ereignty is indivisible for the same reason that it is inalienable. For either
the general will is general, or it is not. It is the will of either the people as
a whole or of only a part” (Rousseau 1987, 154). Sovereignty and generality
are defi ned together. As Lester Crocker (1995) objected, only the people as
a whole are “the people” in the sense of the source of legitimacy. Th e very
meaning of sovereignty, or the general will, is the project of sustaining that
generality. No one may be structurally excluded since it would be a preemp-
tive “breach of generality,” in what would, from the start, diff erentiate the
foundational, shared interests that the state is to realize through its institu-
tion (Rousseau 1987, 154n1).
Second, the general will is what we discern when we think as citizens
about the conditions necessary not only to sustaining our generality but
also relatedly our shared well-being. Some, with good reason, have framed
the general will as metaphysical. It is not impossible to draw this conclu-
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Rousseau’s General Will 103
sion when it seems to have an existence independent of people’s ability to
grasp it. At the same time, Rousseau makes it clear that the general will is
in each citizen and that it must be realized locally, expressing the needs and
possibilities of a given, limited, if permeable, community. In this sense, the
general will also describes the scope of political identity. Between the univer-
sal and particular, what is general to a people is determined by the common
context of their lives. Th is can be defi ned in the negative, as Max Weber
outlined, when he wrote that a people recalls itself as such when attacked in
war with other nations (Weber 1994, 1–28). It is also conceded when people
defend the need for domestic infrastructure, for roads and technology that
reliably enables communication and transportation, and for minimizing the
decimation of necessarily shared natural environments.
Th ird, indispensable to the life of the general will is retaining active legis-
lative power through periodically assembling everyone in the polity. Against
those who might see this as unviable, Rousseau cited instances in the Ro-
man Republic when citizens voted from rooftops. To secure such assem-
blies, he insisted that the people prearrange dates when they would be held
that members of the government could neither postpone nor cancel. As has
been widely noted, reading Rousseau as a forerunner to the deliberative
democratic project does require separating some of his writings from the
spirit that runs through them: He did fear public deliberation, fundamen-
tally linking it to opportunities through which people could easily be cor-
rupted or misled by leaders of fractious partial associations. When it came
to voting, or expressing what each citizen thought properly expressed the
general will, he preferred that people quietly consult the voice of their own
conscience, the same one that he had identifi ed in the First Discourse with
the true philosophy of which most citizens were capable. Still, evident in
this prescription is Rousseau’s deep antagonism to political representation.
Although he did admit that it was unavoidable in some instances, he ulti-
mately pinned the decay of healthy polities or the effi cacy of the general will
on the partial will that undoubtedly evolved with and would be prioritized
by members of a governing class.
Fourth, the initial moment of forming the compact had to be unanimous,
but following that, what emerged as the majority opinion of what consti-
tuted the general will could suffi ce. If decisions were highly consequential,
such as involved in the amending of law, one needed a signifi cant majority.
Where expediency could be the primary concern, a simple majority would
do. Even then, however, voting on the general will involved a particular
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104 Rousseau’s General Will
disposition and kind of activity. In particular, when casting their ballots,
what citizens expressed was not their interests or wishes as private citizens,
but what they were convinced was the exemplifi cation of the general will
as we have already defi ned it. In healthier polities, Rousseau suggested that
these outcomes would be largely self-evident so that formal laws would be
few and would simply enunciate what “everybody ha[d] already felt” (1987,
204). Still, in those cases when its content was murkier, if it turned out that
some citizens’ views did not prevail, they were to surmise that they had
been in error. If anything, they would be relieved that others had corrected
their mistake, preemptively curbing its potential destructiveness. Rousseau
writes of these cases, “If my private opinion had prevailed, I would have
done something other than what I had wanted. In that case I would not
have been free” (206).
Fifth, while suggesting in these cases that the general will can be arrived
at numerically, Rousseau goes on to off er some qualifi cation: “It should be
seen that what makes the will general is not so much the number of votes
as the common interest that unites them, for in this institution each per-
son necessarily submits himself to the conditions he imposes on others, an
admirable accord between interest and justice” (Rousseau 1987, 158). Th e
general will, as already mentioned, is what the diff erences have in common,
what remains when “the pluses and minuses” of particular interests “cancel
each other out.” But what does this mean? Rousseau admits that shared
interests may be felt precisely because of the existence of diff erent, even
sharply divergent ones. If there were none, he comments, everything “would
proceed on its own and politics would cease being an art” (156n2). What is
more, he cautioned that where unanimity reigns, it is a sign of an absence of
liberty or will. Voting, in such instances, is nothing more than the culmina-
tion of fear or fl attery in acclamation. Rather than seriously consider, people
adore or curse (205). In other words, the identifi cation of similarity requires
not obliterating but skillfully negotiating diff erences. Still, the general will
then, though general and necessarily shared, is not identical with a simple
majority. Th e general will must always come out of the majority, but it alone
is not suffi cient.
Sixth, there is a diff erence already implied between what Rousseau desig-
nates the general will and the will of all. Th e latter is the sum or aggregate of
each private citizen considering his or her private interest while the general
will, as I have just said, is the answer one gives when considering the general
interest or common good. In healthier polities the general will and the will
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Rousseau’s General Will 105
in general are more likely to coincide, since in these instances, individual
citizens maintain a clearer sense of how intertwined are their own and the
community’s needs and concerns. Th ey sustain a mutual identifi cation, a
sense that they are joined not only by shared functions, but a common
existence.
Seventh, the general will is not foreign or alien to us. We have a sense
of it, however vague, since it is, as mentioned above, one of the many wills
that we feel. It can also, for this reason, often be muted or trumped (Rous-
seau 1987, 150). Fidelity to its implied demands is never assured. Writes
Rousseau:
In fact, each individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to or
diff erent from the general will that he has as a citizen. His private inter-
est can speak to him in an entirely diff erent manner than the common
interest. His absolute and naturally independent existence can cause him
to envisage what he owes the common cause as a gratuitous contribu-
tion, the loss of which will be less harmful to others than its payment is
burdensome to him. And in viewing the moral person which constitutes the
state as a being of reason because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights
of a citizen without wanting to fulfi ll the duties of a subject, an injustice
whose growth would bring about the ruin of the body politic. (Ibid.;
italics added)
Private interests appear to private men as natural and absolute. Calling out
loudly with a piercing clarity, they make all other kinds of needs appear
elusive, mystical, and suspect. Th e defi ning mold of interests becomes those
that we would think we could satisfy on our own, with no social or political
mediation. From this vantage point, arrogant with a sense of independent
competence, common concerns, and shared causes, “the moral person” or
“being of reason that is the state,” seem unnecessary or deceptive. Th e quo-
tidian and seeming individual quality of the experience of meeting some
needs allows one to imagine that these really are discrete from the grander
and more illusive collective sort, the return path of which is circuitous and
highly complex. Th e diff use nature of politics, sociality, and shared living,
combined with intense ideological work that suggests that one can mean-
ingfully be an individual apart from public life, allow us to think that we
are not actually interdependent. Th e fact that neither politics nor sovereign
power nor the conditions of reciprocity that can secure liberty are embod-
ied in one man to whom we might point, enables many to think that what
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106 Rousseau’s General Will
maintains our freedom is in fact an infringement on it. Th e amorphous na-
ture of actual sovereignty, Rousseau here concedes, anticipating subsequent
charges made by critics, endangers it for those for whom that which is real
must be more concretely material. Its ruin comes of the belief that leads to
acting as if the grounds indispensable for freedom are not themselves neces-
sary. It is easy for each citizen to minimize the signifi cance of his or her dis-
investment from political life and to see idiosyncratic preferences as a more
signifi cant expression of who they were.
In addition, when we in fact try to act from the general will, we may do
so in ways that are “unenlightened,” misdirected, or too narrow. When suf-
fi ciently well informed, “with no communication among themselves,” de-
liberations would always be good. By contrast, with the growth of intrigues
and partial association, the will of each of these, particular and less compre-
hensive than the polity itself, is felt by subgroup members to be synonymous
with the general will (Book II, chap. 3). Rather than an array of individual
voters, wills coalesce around these factions, reducing their overall number
and assuring that each citizen does not make up his or her own mind (Rous-
seau 1987, 156). When this happens in the extreme, Rousseau insists, in a
way almost always ignored by most of his readers, the response must be to
multiply their number and to prevent inequalities among them (ibid.). In
other words, the diff erences must be rendered less fractious, so that they do
not, in a defi nitive way, undercut the possibility of a will as broad as the pol-
ity itself. Th e diffi culty with partial societies is neither membership in nor
loyalty to them, but that we tend to narrow our focus beneath full general-
ity, enabling us to conclude, usually at the behest of tricky leaders, that pur-
suing this restricted will alone is suffi cient. Doing so renders each of these
divergent interests less negotiable or mediatable, more likely to be treated
as an exclusive, antagonistic end. Still, Rousseau insists, “If there were no
diff erent interests, the common interest, which would never encounter any
obstacle, would scarcely be felt” (Rousseau 1987, 156n2).
Th is is why Rousseau insists that we must agree in advance to the neces-
sary grounds for politics, why we give an a priori “yes” to the general will, a
commitment to the recuperation of the public spiritedness that will inevita-
bly be in decline. Th is insight underpins the infamous passage that, together
with the demand (qualifi ed subsequently) that we alienate everything in the
initial act of convention, is the basis of many of the staunchest objections to
Rousseau’s political writings. He states,
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Rousseau’s General Will 107
Th us, in order for the social compact to avoid being an empty formula,
it tacitly entails the commitment—which alone can give force to the
others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to
do so by the entire body. Th is means merely that he will be forced to be
free. For this is the sort of condition that, by giving each citizen to the
homeland, guarantees him against all personal dependence—a condition
that produces the skill and the performance of the political machine,
and which alone bestows legitimacy upon civil commitments. Without
it such commitments would be absurd, tyrannical and subject to the
worst abuses. (Rousseau 1987, 150)
Private interests will always be in greater supply than the public spiritedness
required to sustain the body politic that alone can diminish our dependence
and encourage the civic skill and participation that can keep our relations
from devolving into tyrannical ones. We assent in advance to being pulled
back into our shared role as sovereign for when hiding from this, we dimin-
ish sovereignty itself, compromising its generality. What we agree to, then,
is sustaining our role in the project of our shared autonomy.
Th ere is great risk that assurances of legitimacy will be only empty for-
mulas, the written dreams of outsiders that meet the requirements of logic
or style, but certainly not of politics. Dagger (1997) argues that having made
laws in one’s capacity as a citizen that aim to enable social cooperation, one
must share the burden of following them. It is not enough for the people to
have constituted the state through sanctioning a series of laws or establishing
electoral mechanisms (Rousseau 1987, 195–96). Th eir shared authority is the
state’s heart (194). As Rousseau writes, “Th e brain [which he compares with
executive power] can fall into paralysis and yet the individual may still live. A
man may remain an imbecile and live. But once the heart has ceased its func-
tions, the animal is dead” (ibid.). Freedom requires people continuing to en-
act their collective sovereign power, actively associating, negotiating, and po-
tentially reconciling their shared and disparate needs in a general will. If this
is not genuinely general—if it is instead a particular will of a factious group
presenting its concerns and aims as of more abiding importance—the “politi-
cal machine” will begin to reinstate the cyclical life of the “right” of the stron-
gest. Rather than abetting, it will foment dependence and its exploitation.
Eighth, when we seek to instantiate or discover the general will, we are ar-
ticulating or sanctioning the laws of the polity that must be general in their
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108 Rousseau’s General Will
content. Th e aim is for us each to be suffi ciently equal that they aff ect us all
in comparable ways, benefi ting and harming us similarly. Rousseau did not
think that polities could achieve absolute economic equality because trying
to create and sustain it would nurture sharp resentment and unmediatable
friction. He did stipulate that inequality should not be so pronounced that
one person could buy another or that another would have need to sell him-
self. For under those conditions, as I discussed in Chapter 1, the interests of
each party would become fundamentally opposed. Th ere would be no over-
arching general will that could incorporate both. Th is had been the case in
Rome in which the patricians and plebeians in fact formed two cities in the
physical space of one (Rousseau 1987, 205). Rousseau emphasized that the
equality he sought was not a natural outcome, but this did not mean it was
mere “speculative fi ction” either (171). If abuses were inevitable, they could
and should be regulated. “It is precisely because the force of things tends
always to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend
to maintain it” (171). Th e general will is therefore invested with the role of
counterweight, of preserving the very fragile and always endangered circum-
stances that make it possible to resolve diff erences according to principles of
right as collectively articulated.
Many writers have criticized Rousseau’s emphasis on the indispensability
of political unity to legitimate governance as potentially repressive. Citing
lines in which he encourages contracting citizens to alienate everything, that
express disdain for membership in partial associations, that make casual ref-
erence to forcing citizens to be free and that demand that members of the
polity distinguish private from public willing, many see in Rousseau’s writ-
ings dangerous formulas for intolerant, majoritarian societies with no room
for dissent or innovation. It is true that Rousseau sees collectivisms that can
prove dangerous as indispensable to political legitimacy, trying to counter
their inherent extremes rather than banishing them from public life. But it
is worth recalling the forms of diff erence that Rousseau feared. Th ey were
not of a primarily cultural, racial, or religious nature—indeed in the Social
Contract, he is most intolerant of the religiously intolerant. He did fear poli-
ties seeing value only in what came from elsewhere, trying always to be other
than what they were rather than developing themselves. Still, the forms of
diff erence that he thought would erode the general will were very particular,
focused on radical economic inequalities and heavy-handed and censorious
religious authorities. When he spoke of individuals who would manipulate
the language of the commons through “personal trust” and eloquence (115)
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Rousseau’s General Will 109
to seduce other men, it was always for the sake of their own narrow private
profi teering.
At the same time, many criticisms have been made of Rousseauian equal-
ity. From the perspective of Judith Shklar (1988, 260–73), the demand that
law aff ect all comparably remains absolute in a way that is unachievable.
Although Rousseau helps us more fully to understand the diffi culties of
creating equality through politics, he should, yet does not, fashion rights to
protect the inevitable existence of unequal minorities. Th e question should
not be if legitimacy (and equality) is present or absent, but the inevitably
imperfect degree to which it is positively realized. John McCormick (2007;
2011) also warns that we be alert to the absence of institutional safeguards
but with very diff erent consequences. Against Shklar, he considers the read-
ing of Rousseau as the prophet of egalitarian democracy ironic, for without
off ering institutional blueprints to curb material inequalities, McCormick
cautions, he is, more accurately, the architect of a legitimated oligarchy.
While it is true that Rousseau off ers few helpful suggestions about creating
or maintaining the rough economic equality that he demands, it would re-
quire stretching him to a point of unrecognizability to frame him as suggest-
ing that oligarchies could be legitimate in his terms. When Rousseau does
off er suggestions about how best to realize the carefully calibrated portrait
he off ers—one that combines the focus on deliberation with the correct
outcomes of more justice-oriented models; a language that sounds com-
munitarian with one that treats the individual as its basic unit—they are
normally backward-looking: trying to avoid the introduction of the new
and destructive, since once eroded, in his view, polities cannot be mended.
For this reason, it is more useful and instructive to read the work as off ering
a regulative ideal and normative theory.
Emphasizing the republicanism of Rousseau, Maurizio Viroli (1988), has
drawn attention to the original front piece of the Social Contract, to the quote
from Virgil, “let us provide them with equitable laws” (Aeneid, Book 11) and
a drawing of the cat which Rousseau admired for its determined protec-
tion of its liberty. Viroli insists that liberty for Rousseau is the opposite of
the servitude of being subject to the whims of another man. His aim is for
none to owe obedience to a single person, for all to be equally subject to
the law of their own making. Viroli writes, “Moreover, these passages which
are often used to present an image of a ‘totalitarian’ Rousseau opposed to
freedom must, on the contrary, be considered as so many affi rmations of the
principle of liberty as total independence of the will of any other individual”
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110 Rousseau’s General Will
(1988, 151). For in contrast to men who always seek distinction, “the law . . .
will brook no special case” (191).
Rousseau concludes Book I of the Social Contract with the following:
“It is that instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental compact,
on the contrary, substitutes a moral and legitimate equality to whatever
physical inequality nature may have been able to impose upon men, and
that, however, unequal in force or intelligence they may be, men all be-
come equal by convention and by right” (Rousseau 1987, 153). Although
there are no human worlds without symbolic content, there are those in
which, highly fractured and diff use, these do not map neatly or coherently
onto the physical landscapes through which we move. One must imagine,
absent shared meanings, what a world in which one’s fate is sealed by one’s
physical endowments would be like. If not constantly violent and deadly, as
Hobbes surmised, it is clear that the mundane living that is borne of stabil-
ity and certainty would be impossible and with it most other attributes and
products of culture and civilization. Th e state of nature, the metaphorical
beforehand to which one might constantly return, is not preindustrialized
Europe or North America before the arrival of colonists. It is instead the
ongoing potential for a collapse into asocial living, for the disintegration of
politics into battles of the “right” of the strongest or war. An apt metaphor
for these kinds of devolution is moving through a no man’s land or travel in
a time of war. One might, along a dusty, broken road, or a set of tracks, en-
counter an ally, who is also trying to locate medical supplies, weapons, or his
wife. One would as easily confront a national enemy similarly stranded. All
are likely to be desperate. Why else would one undertake a voyage through
an unknowable terrain? One might, with luck, in fact arrive at one’s des-
tination, but the series of events of the physical journey may have com-
pletely altered the course of one’s life. It will have required making a deal
at a checkpoint, making or losing a companion, a safe route that took one
fundamentally off course.
José Ortega y Gasset (1932) has described the “ever–present problem” of
the relation between artifi cial civilization and self-supporting nature. Re-
minding readers of the insights of the Romantics, he points toward the wild
vegetation that can only briefl y be stifl ed by the scythe and geometric stone.
Th e Romantics and Ortega seize on the insight that everything is ultimately
earth, pointing to majestic monuments now overgrown with moss, mold,
and vines. Civilization requires constant upkeep, ongoing artistry. If one
wants its fruits, one must inherit and take on anew the project of its up-
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Rousseau’s General Will 111
holding. Otherwise it can and does vanish quickly. Indeed Ortega’s fear was
that modern men treated civilization as if it grew up as spontaneously as a
forest and thus inhabited it as if primitive men in a state of nature (88–89).
Exhibiting neither interest nor affi nity with the values that were the base
of its construction, such men would, as we saw in Chapter 1, valorize the
archaic and primitive.
Such sentiments could not be more antithetical to the impulse at the core
of politics and the polis that we have been exploring. For, writes Ortega,
these begin with the creation of a new kind of space that is fundamentally
diff erent from, and often opposed to the open country:
Th e Graeco-Roman decides to separate himself from the fi elds, from
“Nature,” from the geo-botanic cosmos. How is this possible? . . . .
Where will he go, since the earth is one huge, unbounded fi eld? Quite
simple; he will mark off a portion of this fi eld by means of walls, which
set up an enclosed, fi nite space over against amorphous, limitless space.
Here you have the public square. . . . [I]t is purely and simply the nega-
tion of the fi elds. Th e square, thanks to the walls that enclose it, is a
portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates
the rest and sets up in opposition to it. Th is lesser, rebellious fi eld, which
secedes from the limitless one, and keeps to itself, is a space sui generis,
of the most novel kind . . . an enclosure apart which is purely human, a
civil space. (1932, 152)
Finally, as I stated at the outset, while the general will is fragile in the
sense that it can be evaded, trumped, and ignored, even then, as the aspi-
ration that could sustain the spirit that leads to the formation of political
associations, it does not die.
reconciling what is consented to with what is right
Th e general will, as Nancy Hirschmann (1992, chap. 2) aptly put it, must
be chosen and it must be right. It seems straightforward that the general
will tends toward public utility, toward a good that is common. Th is is its
purpose. Its meaning is the same as the actions that might achieve this aim.
But in what sense is the general will always right? Th e general will has nor-
mative force: it always has the right and is legitimate, for it is the people as
the source of legitimation seeking their own common good. But it is also
supposed to be correct in an epistemological sense.
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112 Rousseau’s General Will
To assist citizens, enlightening rather than misleading them, Rousseau
looks in the SC for assistance in the fi gure of the legislator and to civil
religion. Less explicitly than in other writings, he also outlines a pedagogi-
cal view of politics, one in which ongoing opportunities to participate in
civic activities would give the public life a tangible reality, anchoring our
orientation toward its sustenance. On the question of law and the legisla-
tor, Rousseau refl ects, “Whatever is good and in conformity with order is
such by the nature of things and independently of human conventions.
All justice comes from God; he alone is its source. But if we knew how to
receive it from so exalted a source, we would have no need for government
or laws. Undoubtedly there is a universal justice emanating from reason
alone; but this justice, to be admitted among us, ought to be reciprocal”
(1987, 160). Although the social orders through which justice and right may
be pursued are based in human conventions, what is good or in order is so
independently of these, with their existence discrete from their empirical
instantiation in a particular time or place. Justice’s source ultimately is G-d,
however, through reason, we can fathom its universal form. But how do we
give it more than conceptual life? How do we bring about political justice? It
does not suffi ce for each of us to act on what we tenuously grasp as divine.
Th is may be equivalent to acting ethically, but in the absence of institutions
to assure that conditions of association are honored reciprocally, laws of
justice will be observed by the good and fl outed by the wicked. Th e former’s
credit of grace may increase, but, in worldly terms, in the absence of legal
institutions, taking ones cues from domains of the divine may be to act the
fool. It could be politically astute to be the liar or cheat. We must therefore
aim to craft laws that admit more infi nite standards among us. For these to
be effi cacious turns on assuring that they are framed by an entire populace
considering only and all of itself.
But, asks Rousseau, how would such an accord emerge? By sudden in-
spiration? “Who will give it the necessary foresight to formulate acts and to
promulgate them in advance or how will it announce them in time of need?
How will a blind multitude . . . carry out on its own an enterprise as great
and as diffi cult as a system of legislation?” (1987, 162). We all, as both private
individuals and citizens, need guides. Rousseau concedes from early on that
as private individuals we see the good that we reject (usually in treating our
individual private wills or those of partial societies as more real and urgent
than the public ones that set the condition for their realization) and that as
citizens we want a good that we do not see. Th ere are instances in which the
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Rousseau’s General Will 113
general will is self-evident. In many other cases, it is diffi cult to discern its
shape in one alternative as opposed to another.
Rousseau comments on the dilemma: for an emerging people to grasp
sound maxims of politics and rules of statecraft, they would need already
to possess the “social spirit” that the institution is to produce in them. Men
would before the creation of laws be what laws were to enable them to
become. And so, he refl ects, one would need gods to give men laws. Or
foreigners. Or religious and republican prophets, including Moses, Moham-
med, or Lycurgus. What characterizes all three categories is that members of
them behold the passions of men without feeling them and have no affi nity
with our “nature” which they know thoroughly. Th eir potential glory is of
another sort, in legend or immortal memory. In other words, their labors
could not be more diff erent than those of artists and scientists in Rousseau’s
First Discourse: they instead resemble the few whom he there prizes.
Th ese individuals then serve as catalysts or midwives for the transforma-
tion that Rousseau has already described as following from the creation of
the social compact. But it would be dangerous to give administrative powers
to those seeking such a massive and radical undertaking. Th is is why they
must, as did the fi rst of human languages, “compel without violence and
persuade without convincing” (CW 7, 296). But how? Th ey will speak of
dilemmas that are untranslatable, of aspirations so general and distant to be
beyond grasp, and in language that must be understood by people who see
the future as chimerical. Does this sound miraculous? It is. Th ese fi gures,
ones that Max Weber described as the charismatic founders of countless
movements and nations, often claim to speak for the gods, but unlike the
“false” messiahs or upstarts of each generation, they eff ectively move the rel-
evant people, giving them an identifying purpose across generations. Rous-
seau insists that this does not mean that the objects of religion and politics
are identical. Only that they must work in tandem at the start of nations.
For some readers, the introduction of the fi gure of the legislator is an
admission of failure on Rousseau’s part, a concession to the impossibility of
the emergence of the kind of people required to pursue and sustain a general
will. Surely, if it relies upon the appearance of another Moses (both someone
with his features and recognized positively for possessing them), moments of
foundation will be very rare. Arash Abizadeh has argued that we are misled
by trying to imagine that these fi rst laws of establishment, those that enable
us to envision ourselves as an interdependent body with common purpose,
are arrived at through the exchange of argumentation and evidence. A better
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114 Rousseau’s General Will
metaphor, he insists, is made with music. Th ese laws seem to appear and
to appear as right in the way that a melody is simultaneously played and
heard, made and recognized as made right. Margaret Ogrodnick (1999)
interprets the role of the legislator rather diff erently, however. She refl ects,
“Th e impossibility of fi nding such a suprahuman fi gure . . . reinforces the
responsibility for self-transformation that stands behind [Rousseau’s] ideal
of collective self-rule” (123). In other words, it clarifi es both the qualities,
dispositions, and self-understanding required of people capable of collective
self-governance and our distance, even in regimes called “democratic,” from
embodying them.
But none of this can resolve the demands of actual action. For beyond
legislation and active legislative power, there is still a need for a body that
can unite legitimate willing with the force required to do its bidding. Gov-
ernment, Rousseau writes, is the intermediary between the people in their
capacities as sovereign and as subjects, and is to do for the public person
what the union of soul and body achieves in man. It is the sovereign’s minis-
ter, loaned its power for the sake of executing laws, applying their spirit and
principles to deal with particular matters.
And yet although this conception of the relationship of sovereignty to
government remains consistent, the appropriate form of government will
depend on a particular place—the size of its population and distribution of
its wealth and resources. Each regime has its weaknesses. Th e greatest fl aw
of democracy, for instance, is that, more than its alternatives, it frequently
leads to the confusing of sovereignty with government when liberty depends
upon this conceptual and practical separation. If the majority of people,
as the term democracy classically suggests, were actually to execute public
policy, this would require that many among the sovereign people would
turn from a focus on maintaining a general perspective to a preoccupation
with particular people, relations, and objects, making it increasingly diffi -
cult not to treat private interests as the business of public aff airs. Democratic
governance could also, as Aristotle had cautioned, have the eff ect of displac-
ing the sovereign general will with nothing more than a magistrate (if now
made up of many people enacting a unanimous whim) pronouncing decrees
(Rousseau 1987, 162). Th e distinction between sovereignty and government
requires that we consider whether the presence of institutions associated
with democratic rule ensures that the legitimacy associated with the aspira-
tion to self-governance is in fact present.
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Rousseau’s General Will 115
Th at is why, Rousseau insists in ways that most dismiss as outmoded and
romantic, that the tasks in which politics consists cannot be abrogated. Th ey
will be. Public service will cease to be the chief business of citizens. Merce-
naries and political representatives will signal ailing polities. In assemblies,
people will answer “a diff erent question from the one [they were] asked”
(Rousseau 1987, 204). Instead of voting for that which is advantageous to
the state, they will weigh in for the advance of this man or that party or an-
other opinion. In these cases, rather than running to assemblies, as citizens
do in well-run cities, people will fi ercely avoid them. Knowing and resisting
a process through which the general will is sure not to predominate, in its
name, bad laws will breed worse ones. Rousseau declares, “Once someone
says what do I care? about the aff airs of the state, the state should be consid-
ered lost” (198). Patriotism will dwindle. Private interests will appear as all
that remains. States, in the sense of living polities, will die.
But perhaps this sounds really silly. Th rough its lens, most of political
history would then be that of dead states and much that is called politics
would instead constitute its abrogation. What would remain as politics
would be too narrow to be of any use. It would only refer to exceptional
moments when fallible and limited men and women act like gods, or re-
semble prophets.
To conclude this, however, would be misleading. Politics must be about
what is general, what can emerge as shared in a context of permanent and
abiding diff erence. Much works against this fragile, distinctive domain, but
if its terms and terrain are completely eradicated, all that remains are diff er-
ent institutional iterations of the “right” of the strongest. In such instances,
while their functioning may be less immediately corporeal, institutions and
the laws they enshrine merely increase the force and will of some. Th ese will
be referred to as “political” because they possess the outer trappings associ-
ated with its unique aspirations, but may as well be the exchange of blows,
of each seizing that from which they can fend off others. Rousseau is right to
emphasize that most people will resist participating in this kind of “politics.”
Its colloquial connotations—“it’s just political,” “dirty politics”—admit a
sense of betrayal linked fundamentally to an acknowledgment of misuse.
Rousseau knew well that people did and would gawk at his refl ections:
Legitimate government, they would mock, following David Hume, is noth-
ing more than subjects grown accustomed to those who dominate them.
Or, in the spirit of Weber, it is leaders who can expect that their commands
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116 Rousseau’s General Will
will in fact be obeyed, whether or not they should be. Or in Marxist tones,
what is ever framed as “general” beyond ideas that secure the position of
the ruling class? It is only one more skillful use of cultural capital to frame
as progress and emancipation the transformation of the lives of dominated
people into further, maldistributed surplus accumulation. Rousseau would
reply that to treat these as the only possibilities is to have been deceived by
looking only at states badly constituted; to confuse profound challenges for
that which cannot be surmounted. Knowing scandalous knaves and credu-
lous urbanites does not eliminate what Rousseau says with certainty: that
the people of Berne would have sentenced Cromwell to hard labor. In this
instance, while the examples are European, one hears echoes of the indi-
vidual acts of refusal that I explored in Chapter 1.
As I have discussed, Rousseau clearly argues that the general will is more
audible in healthier societies in which public life is real and primary, with
coherent and demonstrable meaning for its members. As living projects,
however, even these polities begin to die at the moment of their birth. One
can prolong their coherence, but its vibrancy remains delicate and easily
undercut. Once the social bond, organizing core, and generality is “broken
in all hearts” and “the basest interest brazenly adopts the sacred name of
the public good” (Rousseau 1994, 198), it can be mended neither by reform
nor by revolution. Finally, writes Rousseau, “when the state, on the verge
of ruin, subsists only in an illusory and vain form . . . then the general will
becomes mute. Everyone guided by secret motives, no more express their
opinions as citizens than if the state had never existed; and iniquitous de-
crees having as their sole purpose the private interest are falsely passed under
the name of laws” (1987, 204).
Nothing is more stable and constant than our weakness. And so Rous-
seau places the beginning of our hopes there: “It does not automatically lead
to happiness; and, when it does, this happiness promises neither absolute
certainty nor defi nitive rest. It consists of practicing a healthy form of socia-
bility: it is not much, perhaps, but it is all that is open to us. As Rousseau re-
marks, we draw the remedy from the very nature of our disease, and do so in
a way that most closely conforms to our human condition” (Todorov 2001,
65–66). We travel with Rousseau from moments of inspiration and pro-
found hope to others of dashing disappointment. And we are reminded,
again and again, that the verdict on the possible lies only with living people
already enmeshed in societies of varied degrees of illegitimacy.
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Rousseau’s General Will 117
Jason Neidleman (2001) has argued that Rousseau is often charged with
contradictions that are features of the projects of self-governance that are
his focus. He does combine commitments that democratic notions of legiti-
macy must also always hold in tension: One is transcendental—it is what
is necessary and universal for something to be; in this case, for a political
society to have an ongoing shared life requires a discernable general will. Th e
other is general and therefore particular in relation to the universal: an in-
dispensable commitment to the consent of a given people that will interpret
and articulate the general will in light of their own, specifi c predicament.
still emerging general wills
While societies with eroded general wills could not be mended, there were
also general wills that were still in the making. Rousseau considered this
to be the case with the island of Corsica for which he was asked to play
the role of legislator. Christopher Kelly (2005) argues that what interested
Rousseau in this task was precisely the island’s reputation as a European
backwater, as the opposite of French and English models of eighteenth-
century strong states. Kelly writes, “Rather than seeing Corsica as merely
the uncivilized abode of bandits in need of colonial rule by a continental
power, he regarded it as the one place in Europe still capable of receiving a
sound legislation” (xiv).
Formerly colonized by the Moors and then the Genoans, the framing
question of Rousseau’s work was how the island could aim to become a
genuinely postcolonial state: how to move it out of conditions of economic
dependence and poverty. He surmised that this would require fi guring out
how to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an asset, most
ambitiously how to translate its produce into international capital. Rous-
seau insisted, as Fanon would later, that the newly independent Corsicans
should not aim to emulate the culture of their former colonizers, but to lead
a concerted national eff ort to identify and cultivate its indigenous resources,
most centrally its people. Th is would require Corsicans treating Corsica as
its own economic and political center, rather than as an outpost or append-
age to another mother country. One indispensable resource for this project
was that Corsicans were not decadent; they did not display the individual
and collective vices of their supposedly more civilized Western counterparts.
Th is, for Rousseau, meant that they remained spirited. Still, this strength
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118 Rousseau’s General Will
could easily collapse into widespread banditry, especially if people grew im-
patient with the project of building a legitimate democratically governed
state. Rousseau argued that they did not need to become diff erent from how
they were but to preserve this in the absence of a shared enemy that united
them across diff erences. Th ey could do this by directing these forces toward
maintaining their independence.
Rousseau insisted that the characterization of Corsica as a lumpenprole-
tarian island of people more inclined to be thieves than hard-working citi-
zens obscured the origins of these predilections in the culture of colonialism
itself. He wrote:
Who would not be seized with horror against a barbarous Govern-
ment that, in order to see these unfortunate people cutting each other’s
throats, did not spare any eff ort for inciting them to do so? Murder was
not punished; what am I saying, it was rewarded. . . . [I]t had as its goal
making more onerous these same taxes which it did not dare to increase,
always holding the Corsicans in abasement by attaching them so to
speak to their soil, by turning them away from commerce, the arts, from
all the lucrative professions, by keeping them from rising up, from being
educated, from becoming rich. Its goal was to get all produce dirt-cheap
from the monopolies of its offi cials. It took every measure for draining
the Island of money in order to make it necessary there, and in order
always to keep it from returning to it. Tyranny could not apply a more
refi ned maneuver, while appearing to favor cultivation, it succeeded in
crushing the nation; it wanted to reduce it to a heap of base peasants
living in the most deplorable misery. (CW 11, 137)
In other words, Corsicans had come to deplore labor not only as a pure loss
to them, but also as a seemingly permanent and destructive sentence. It was
from this condition that Rousseau now hoped the Corsicans could emerge.
Recommending a temporary isolationism that would force the island to
increase the interdependence of its regions, it would turn to agriculture as
sustaining predispositions necessary to freedom. Unlike town dwellers, rural
people had more children and were more attached to their soil, satisfi ed by
a simple and rustic life that inspired no longing for change. Rousseau con-
trasted them with those involved in commerce that produced wealth and
dependence, rebelliousness and softness.
Having already underscored the appropriateness of specifi c governmental
forms to diff erent environments, Rousseau argued that this rustic place was
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Rousseau’s General Will 119
best fi t for a democracy. Ironically, the counties and jurisdictions that the
colonists had introduced and the destruction of the local nobility that they
had overseen could facilitate a transformation in this direction. Th is was an
instance of the kind of admission that the project of creolization allows: a
strategy that had been devised to subdue the Corsicans could be reemployed
to enlarge their equity and freedom. In securing Corsican independence, it
was key to avoid certain errors frequently made, however. Rousseau warned
“not to allow a fi xed capital, to make the seat of government move from one
town to another, and to assemble the estates of the country in each of them
in their turn” and to “populate the territory uniformly, spread[ing] abun-
dance and life all over” (2005, 196). In the case of Corsica, Rousseau insisted
that political creativity would be necessary to assure that the administrative
capital did not thrive as everywhere else fell into economic stagnation. Th is
meant avoiding creating a small group of cities that drew aspiring bourgeoi-
sies that produced nothing. A government surely did require a center, but
this would be a purely administrative one that public men occupied only
temporarily before returning to the other dimensions of their lives. Rous-
seau hoped this might forestall the drawing of cultivators away from the
countryside that would be and would have to be affi rmed as Corsica’s real
source of strength (132).
Rousseau therefore sought to link political privileges not to amassed
wealth but to productive labor. Wanting to avoid what he considered the
debasing introduction of money, he advanced instead the use of a strict
system of exchange. Explaining that money was useful only as a sign of
inequality, particularly for foreigners, one could make exchanges of goods
themselves without mediating values, creating storehouses in certain essen-
tial places. Ultimately, he reminded his readers that political independence,
their ultimate aim, required that all lived well without becoming rich. He
insisted repeatedly that the ease and health of polities were two fundamen-
tally diff erent concerns and that the latter should be their focus. Effi ciency,
in other words, though a modern ideal, could also be a deeply antipolitical
one. In the absence of money and taxation, citizens could be asked instead
to contribute in kind. If roads needed to be built, the citizenry would do so
through their labor.
Rousseau concluded with refl ections about the qualities of human beings:
Here echoing Hobbes, he wrote that it is fear and hope that most govern
men. Parting company there he qualifi ed that while fear only leads people
to recoil lest they face punishment, hope emboldens men and women to
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120 Rousseau’s General Will
act. Th e task then was to awaken the nation’s activity by providing ground
for great hopes. Nothing, he wrote, is more “really beautiful than indepen-
dence and power.” What could sustain the character of a newly articulated
nation was paying close attention to the emerging nature of civil power,
to assure that it would take the form of legitimate authority rather than
abusive wealth. With the latter, Rousseau emphasized, power and authority
would diverge—to obtain wealth and authority would become two separate
tasks with the implication that apparent power was with elected offi cials
while real power remained with the rich who could purchase their authority.
Such practices could only lead to disappointment that would spread languor
throughout the Island.
Th e greatest asset of the Corsicans was that unlike most of their modern
European counterparts, they remained capable of freedom rather than mere
obedience. But the cultivation of a viable political economy would deter-
mine whether this could be mobilized in pursuit of a general will or whether
a will of some would illegitimately prevail, claiming best to embody the
legacy of the fi ght for the island’s hoped for postcolonial condition.
criticisms of rousseau’s general will
Rousseau’s concept of the general will, the centerpiece of his eff ort to over-
come limitations in earlier theories of consensual government, has been
widely dismissed as utopian, authoritarian, repressive, or otherwise fl awed.
Some of its shortcomings can be amended through the rearticulation I off er
here through Fanon. Others are diffi culties that are at the core of the project
of democratic self-governance itself, diffi culties that, because perennial, we
have no choice but to engage. It is frequently assumed that one of the most
insurmountable of these problems and one that Rousseau is least helpful in
adequately addressing is that posed by social diff erence. Many commenta-
tors have argued that the success of the general will in fact turns on the
fi nal eradication of human diversity in political life—a goal that is neither
desirable nor possible. Here I have contended that the general will can do
far more than tolerate and accommodate the most politically relevant of
diff erences. Indeed, if we take seriously one of Rousseau’s coexistensive defi -
nitions of the term, as “what the diff erences have in common,” it suggests
a need for unity that is produced as we grapple with points of divergence
seeking in their combination the most viable articulation of a shared good.
But, even then, he does off er two cautions: we can articulate a general will
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Rousseau’s General Will 121
within an otherwise healthy polity when two extremities are trenchantly
avoided. Th e fi rst is radical economic inequality, specifi cally situations in
which some can aff ord to buy others who are suffi ciently desperate to agree.
Th e second is extreme religious intolerance that would make it impossible
for some citizens to see others as anything other than damned. In both such
circumstances, interests are so fundamentally opposed that the triumphing
of some necessitates the sacrifi ce of others. In these moments, one no longer
has one polity but splintered and multiple smaller ones.
Critics have rejected Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and
the will of all or between a collective interest and a collection of interests as
enabling and necessitating repressive forms of government intervention. For
Lester Crocker (1995, 251), Rousseau’s insistence that the will of the people
and the general will not be the same as they are in liberal societies led him
to aim to make a set of moral responses, presumably those compatible with
public life, refl exive rather than refl ective. A series of skilled puppeteers and
men of deceitful tricks, he interjected, would be necessary to convince citi-
zens that a loss of autonomy (here understood as the pursuit of individual
interests) was not really a loss, and that renunciations of liberty were not
actual abdications. Th is was all pursued, argues Crocker, so that “the in-
ner space we call privacy [would] shr[i]nk as far as possible in Rousseau’s
plans for denaturing men and forming them into social units or ‘citizens’ ”
(253). Of this, J. L. Talmon wrote: “Th e extension of the scope of politics
to all spheres of human interest and endeavor . . . was the shortest way to
totalitarianism” (1986, 47). Rousseau’s plans to make citizens of men off ered
them no rights in the face of unlimited majorities, Talmon concluded. Th is
oversight, according to Leonard Schapiro (1972, 79), was due to Rousseau’s
enmeshing in the abstraction of his general will which led him to want to
scourge all sectional associations, systems of political representation, and
forms of religion incompatible with civil religion.
Rousseau may have sought to curtail the power of kings or of small groups
of powerful elites, conceded Crocker, but in order to do so he made the
people sovereign, rather than individual people themselves. For Rousseau,
this amounted to a sovereignty that involved no actual exercise of power
(Crocker 1995, 255). Crocker therefore concluded, “Since adherence to the
one right will, the collective will purged of all marks of individual wills, is
liberty, it resides outside the experienced will, on the assumption that it
is what one really wills, unknowingly. . . . Th e only freedom, then, is the
freedom to conform, to participate in a monolithic conformity whose noble
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122 Rousseau’s General Will
aim is to end alienation” (260). Perhaps worst of all, since the general will
was no one’s, it encouraged the deception of a set of managers whose narrow
self-interested pursuits would brook no criticisms, protest, or dissent (254).
Framed somewhat diff erently, as “the paradox of politics,” are Bonnie
Honig (2001) and Alan Keenan’s (2003) more recent focus on those prob-
lems magnifi ed through discussion of the role of the legislator. For Honig,
rather than overcoming the problem of law’s arbitrariness and illegitimacy,
Rousseau avoids it through recourse to the foreign-founder who governs
without the people’s consent until he concludes that they have reached po-
litical maturity and can therefore depart. Th e foreignness of the fi gure, in
Honig’s account, is an expression of an attempt to organize and disown the
inevitability, even in avowedly self-authored democratic societies, of con-
tinuing experiences of the authority of the law as alien and, more impor-
tantly, that the people in this and other cases could and did not will them-
selves into existence as a people in the fi rst place. Still, if there is no way to
avoid episodes of alienation, it would be a mistake to try to read these out
of Rousseau and out of political life. Instead the appearance of foreignness
marks ongoing gaps in legitimacy that can be understood as moments re-
quiring augmentation and amendment. More dangerous is to domesticate
it in ways that would obscure “the haunting opacity of the people to one
another and . . . the ambiguity of law that both is and is not the product
of the General Will . . . generated by the people but also imposed by the
lawgiver” (Honig 2001, 31). For Keenan, this problem is not so generative. It
is more fundamental and worrying. For him, if law is to shore up an endan-
gered generality or existence of a people, it encounters the problem of the
people needing to exist already fully in their generality. If there is no natural
source of commonality to which the law is to refer and no “shared practice
of community,” how would laws be articulated and how could it be rational
to make oneself implicated by laws and the common fate that they attempt
to ensure? Rousseau’s “solution,” states Keenan, “is for the legislator to trick
the people into accepting his laws” (2003, 49). Worse still, making reference
to Rousseau’s mention of the invocations by foreign founders of G-d and
immortals, Keenan comments, “Th e people’s predicament is such that they
not only require outside intervention to give them the laws that will make
them whole but they can only accept the laws under false pretenses and in a
way that denies their autonomy” (50).
In a similar spirit, John Charvet has insisted that the consequences of
Rousseau’s “fi xes” is the denial of any valid social life or social interdepen-
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Rousseau’s General Will 123
dence beyond those derived from the will of the political community. “On
the one hand,” Charvet writes, “we have each individual absolutely for him-
self, on his own, and on the other hand we have the all-embracing common
life” (1974, 144). Th is is required, Charvet contends, to avoid the combining
of particular interests and ends that would foster personal dependence on
any but the shared will. Th e diffi culty with this, however, is that the needs
that stimulate these cannot be eradicated through sheer will (ibid.). Steven
Johnston, who argues that the general will is a code of cruelty, asks, amplify-
ing the concerns of Charvet, “Is the price of sovereignty an undeclared war
between those elements engaged in a continual counter-attack in the name
of the so-called particular? Apparently” (1999, 131).
Th e spirit of the arguments of Talmon and Crocker, if an expression of
a vitriolic brand of paranoid liberalism that grew out of experiences of and
responses to World War II and then the Cold War, also echo the nineteenth-
century concerns of Joseph De Maistre and Benjamin Constant, who in-
sisted that Rousseau had confused true freedom with collective obligations
that would substantially restrict it. Th is was due to a fundamental confu-
sion about the public and private domains and the related seeking of free-
dom through what they considered Rousseau’s design for state control. Par-
ticularly nefarious because without explicit individual rights or a conception
of natural property, discussion of the infi nite malleability of human nature
seemed only to promise mass indoctrination and the expanding of the po-
tentially limitless powers of a despotic system. What citizens might imagine
as autonomous action would be nothing more than the acting out of a set of
ideas surreptitiously instilled in them.
Allan Bloom (1990) and Iain Hampsher-Monk (1995), among many oth-
ers, have contended that Rousseau has been charged as much with arguing
for social atomism as for collectivism. Indeed, the response of Hegel and
Marx to Rousseau’s writing was to fear that his conception of freedom re-
mained narrowly individualist, without an overarching political or social
dimension within which liberty could be fulfi lled.
Much like the Bible, interpretations of Rousseau’s general will tell us as
much, if not more, about its readers than about the idea itself.
Th ere is no question that although dubious about excessive unanimity,
Rousseau preferred situations in which the content of the general will was
self-evident, when it was obvious which principles and governing norms
would benefi t the whole community because internal diff erences within
it did not amount to fundamentally opposed interests. While the general
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124 Rousseau’s General Will
will cannot itself create rough economic equality, for instance, it can frame
movements away from it as that which would undercut generality itself (en-
dangering the future of the general will). Still, if the orientation that enables
citizens to think in such ways appears as nurtured through practice and in
this sense refl exive, it is the clear benefi ts of the given fruits that compel us
rather than any skilled puppeteers. Seeing the relative merits of these ar-
rangements as opposed to what we would face in their absence is what spurs
us on to maintain them. Recall that for Rousseau this is, after all, a portrait
of the conditions that make it possible to form and preserve political as-
sociations that introduce a logic other than that of mere force by creating
a collective within which we determine rules that constitute the conditions
of our lives. It is only in this sense, as a description of what is required and
limited by the nature of sociality, that one could call the design total. It does
involve understanding ourselves and our freedom as necessarily intertwined
with that of others who, if diff erent, share a commitment for the kind of
pushing back of arbitrariness that political projects seek.
Still, it is true that Rousseau does not outline blueprints of institutions
to protect the rights of minorities. Th is is, of course, because his design is
premised on hopes that there will be no form of internal diff erentiation that
would require such assistance, that dissimilarities would not constitute the
lines through which aspirations of some are routinely rendered irrelevant.
To build such safeguards into the portrait would be to treat its guiding aims
as impossibilities. While one might say that this remains naïve or nefarious
in a world as varied as our own, it also off ers a very important challenge: that
it is erroneous and politically lazy to assume that the varieties of symbolic
worlds people occupy must be divided by fault lines and fortresses; that the
task is to broach afresh when and why these become so.
Additionally, challenges posed by the idea of the sovereign people, by
how legitimate power becomes present, are real. One answer to this for
Rousseau is his distinction between sovereignty and government: by setting
up the people as articulating and directing that which elected offi cials are
to do, with the ongoing power to challenge outcomes as incompatible with
the general will as they have defi ned it. Setting up this power as inalienable
and indivisible forces people prone to fracture to embody a scope of identity
entirely innovative and artifi cial, that of generality. It is to counterbalance
through its simultaneous breadth and limits shared concerns and values that
will curb internal extremes that would destroy it. One might think here
of the diff erence between the earnings of CEOs and average US citizens
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Rousseau’s General Will 125
when the former catered to a circumscribed national market. Not alienating
a fi nite set of buyers was essential to good business practices. Would that
such “national” concerns still had such constraining eff ects on corporate
managers whose market is now the globe. Finally, while Rousseau did want
members of groups smaller than the polity not to mistake the scope of the
former for the latter, his concern was that loyalties of one did not make
those of the other impossible. Even then, recall that when speaking of fac-
tions, his response to threatening power of a small set was to multiply the
overall number so that the votes of the populace remained multiple rather
than coalescing to leverage a few profi teering individuals.
In other words, for Rousseau, the preserving of conditions of meaningful
freedom required nurturing a situation that all occupied suffi ciently simi-
larly to feel a palpable sense of unity. Th is did not necessitate total power of
the state. Recall here the point emphasized by Cladis, that nothing could
be demanded of individuals that was not of use to the community and that
what was not could be disposed of at will. At the same time, there is no
doubt that Rousseau hoped the general will could be effi cacious, making it
impossible to ignore some members of polity with impunity. As Margaret
Canovan (2005) has astutely emphasized, Rousseau’s discussion is an eff ort
to grapple with how to make an abstract sovereign people present in politics
by uniting the individual and collective dimensions of citizenship in the
realization of the general will, an account of when an otherwise ordinary
collection of people become present as a mobilized majority making claims
as to what best realizes the spirit that shaped the moment of their founda-
tion as a people, and of what revivifi es the legitimacy of a compact that was
made to enlarge the freedom of members by tying them together into a
collective, public self.
Th e logical conclusion of those who would frame the general will as an
unviable collectivism is that the best that we can and should do is to aggre-
gate individual interests while developing and aiming to protect individual
rights according to a set of rules or procedures. Th is position, which is of-
ten expressed in the fear that Rousseau’s designs would necessarily lead to
an absolutist state, convey a cynicism in response to plural and seemingly
irreconcilable viewpoints that many conclude have left the modern world
only with epistemic claims resting on human perspectives that are intensely
fallible and necessarily relative. Th e result is a demand for a feigned universal
human perspective in spite of its known limitations or one that is so mini-
mal in its content not to be useful as a basis for any compelling kind of col-
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126 Rousseau’s General Will
lective life. Both enable wholesale retreats into relativisms of the particular,
in which all that remains of politics are strategic face-off s among crystallized
narrow interests, identifi cations of how they might and absolutely cannot
opportunistically ally. Th ere is little sense that what collides within the po-
litical arena might, if always indexed in terms of a larger shared telos, itself
be open and alterable. In such a context, Jason Neidleman has argued, the
popular will seems to emerge as the only legitimate arbiter of validity claims
(2001, 4). Th e sense that one might seek positions that could be shown to be
right for most of the citizenry is framed not as the meaning of politics but
as naïve and outmoded.
concluding comments
In this chapter, I have explored the concept of the general will as articulated
by Rousseau. In his nimble hands, the general will appears with the very
question of how legitimacy might emerge in and through political life. It
has, in what often infuriates readers, a double nature that mirrors our own
identity as neither gods nor beasts, neither of pure thought nor pure in-
stinct. It similarly mimics the unique domain of politics that emerges from
this peculiar confi guration of what we are not. Seeking to fi nd and sustain
general life among sharply divergent interests and identities, to institution-
alize reciprocity, freedom, and self-realization in the units through which
enmity and war have been and will be fought, politic is also double. Incred-
ibly quotidian, it is the absolute foundation for the possibility of anything
more. And so with the general will. Combining features that are at once
transcendental—it is what is universally necessary for the very possibility of
a political future—it insists too on the indispensability of the specifi c chal-
lenges of distinctive people from whom it must emerge.
Th ose who have grappled with Rousseau’s multifaceted general will are
sure to be immediately struck by lines in Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre or
Wretched of the Earth describing national consciousness: It was to be the
“all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people,”
“the living expression of the nation” which was “the moving consciousness
of the whole of the people,” “the coherent, enlightened action of men and
women.” Th e “more the people understand, the more watchful they be-
come,” the more they would come to realize “that fi nally . . . their salvation
lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests.”
Unlike Rousseau, who periodically paused to insist on the realizability of
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Rousseau’s General Will 127
his most rigorous of conceptual articulations of the nature of political legiti-
macy, in Fanon, how this is to emerge is his explicit focus, shaping the theo-
retical endeavor. For him, it emerges in and through history, in struggles of
groups, framed as a separate species, trying to reinsert themselves into his-
tory rather than remaining forcibly outside of its march. It is the contours
of this collective struggle that for him prove determining of the fl uidity and
malleability of lines of diff erence in its aftermath. If Rousseau distinguished
between the general will and the will in general, for Fanon of greatest sig-
nifi cance to questions of postcolonial legitimacy was the necessity of moving
beyond nationalism essential to ousting occupiers toward what he called
national consciousness. Without such a transition, a form of identifi cation
that was, in one moment, broad, fruitful, and innovative became empty,
zombifi ed, and dangerous.
In the next chapter I will explore how Fanon eff ectively takes up, re-
works, and expands the notion of “the general will” into the idea of “na-
tional consciousness” or the creolized sensibilities of an emergent Algerian
nation unifi ed in its diversity. Particularly striking in light of their many
signifi cant similarities is one fundamental diff erence: While one can piece
together a sense of how Rousseau would have suggested one move from liv-
ing under norms of illegitimate governance toward political right, in spite
of his periodic insistences to the contrary, his explorations were richest in
the philosophical and theoretical mode. Th ey articulated a regulative ideal
through which we might critically evaluate existing regimes to articulate
directions that would make them less imperfect. Fanon’s political theory, by
contrast, is embedded in and emerges directly out of describing the stages
of trying to forge just such a transition. He thereby deepens and radicalizes
Rousseau’s insights, underscoring their irredeemably political dimensions
and off ering the possibility of setting up imaginings that do not only reject
but also critically engage the best resources of the project of modern Europe
precisely so that we might move beyond it.
Crucially for our purposes, while Fanon’s insights affi rm the centrality of
a revised notion of the general will to the project of creating polities that are
no longer colonized, his articulation of a public or common good is not a
homogenized but a creolized one. In other words, if Rousseau’s general will
can be interpreted as making a potentially untenable problem of complex
and abiding forms of diversity typical of most modern states, Fanon off ers
the challenge of political legitimacy as facilitating their negotiability, media-
tion, and possible reconciliation. He does this by suggesting that divergent
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128 Rousseau’s General Will
identities need not enter the polity only on the model of exclusive, mutually
hostile special interests that can at best be incompletely accommodated.
In off ering a portrait of how we can conceive of a politics that produc-
tively engages dissensus and cultural diff erence to create new political frames
of reference and action beyond, for example, multiculturalism, Rousseau’s
notion of the “general will” and Fanon’s “national consciousness” could not
be more appropriate and potentially fruitful as each recognizes the indis-
pensability of attempts to reconcile the contentions between individual and
group self-interests while continuing unrelentingly to search for a common
or general good.
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129
4
Fanonian National Consciousness
If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe and America into a new Europe, then let us
leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. Th ey will know how to do it better than
the most gifted among us. But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to
bring it up to a diff erent level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent
and we must make discoveries.
—frantz fanon
Although his early theoretical work on racism and colonialism focused pri-
marily on the question of disalienation in terms requiring an interrogation of
the human sciences, especially psychiatry, Fanon found himself in a diffi cult
situation as head of the psychiatric division at Blida-Joinville Hospital at the
dawn of the Algerian War. His experience as a soldier twice decorated for valor
in World War II, his medical knowledge, and his commitment to struggles for
freedom led to his aiding the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), his eventual
resignation from his state-supported position of head psychiatrist, and his
formally joining the FLN. Th e observations and arguments he subsequently
made in Les Damnés de la terre or Wretched of the Earth are thus informed by
his on-the-ground experience in addition to his theoretical acumen.
introducing national consciousness
Fanon suggested that it was only through directly fi ghting forces of repres-
sion that a submerged Algerian nation or its general will, squelched and
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130 Fanonian National Consciousness
rendered irrelevant by colonial relations, could spring to life (WE, 131). He
warned that where fatality permeated people, those who oppressed them
were never blamed (54). Instead the diverse people who together constituted
the colonized turned to magic, myth, and internal tribal feuds, all of which
preexisted colonialism, in forms of avoidance that amounted to “collective
auto-destruction” (ibid.). Although occupying the same physical territory,
the colonized had little reason to think of themselves as sharing a political
identity or as belonging to one nation with a potentially sovereign will.
Indeed their divisions were many: Th ere were, after all, those who managed
to benefi t and those who were excluded from the advantages of colonial
exploitation. People living in the countryside saw those living in the towns
as having taken on European dress and speech, as having betrayed the na-
tional heritage (112). Urban party and trade union organizers who made
ventures into rural areas frequently acted arrogantly by ignoring the author-
ity of respected traditional leaders or the longstanding signifi cance of local
clan and tribal diversity. Th ey also generally feared the spontaneous violent
outbreaks of the peasantry (113). Finally, there were revolutionary political
and intellectual minorities from the towns who, breaking with the legalism
and reconciliatory approaches of recognized local leaders, were imprisoned,
exiled, and radicalized by country people ready through armed insurrection
to take their land back. In an opposite movement were the lumpenprole-
tariat, who, fl eeing the destitution of the country, swelled the urban fringes.
Unwilling to be reformed by a colonial society that they could only ever
enter with the use of force, they came to direct this otherwise unpredictable
and explosive action decisively toward spearheading “the procession of the
awakened nation” (130).
It was initially in eff orts to cast off a shared enemy, a shared source of
alienation, that people placed unequally and disparately within the polity
developed a sense of a collective fate, a sense of themselves as an emergent
nation. For it and they to enter history required a combination of all engag-
ing in a chain of discrete, local, irrevocable actions from which there was
no turning back and the deliberate rooting out of local rivalries that could
stall or interrupt an onward march toward sovereignty (WE, 132). In a con-
fraternity more typical of a church, or the indivisibility of which Rousseau
spoke, yesterday’s enemies joined together to widen a national assault on
their occupiers.
Even then, however, if a “racial feeling” or determination to reject all who
were foreign was enough to enter a revolutionary fi ght, it was not enough to
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Fanonian National Consciousness 131
sustain it (WE, 139). Hatred and resentment alone made even some of the
most resolute easily manipulated. Some would be blinded by the simplest
of humane gestures, becoming convinced that nicer mundane treatment by
the colonists (which, in fact, were each extorted concessions), itself consti-
tuted a victory. Others would be tempted with slightly more. With prom-
ises of abandoning those who continued courageously to fi ght, they would
move into positions once occupied by settlers. Satisfed with much less than
a general will—by what we might call a will of some—they had little or no
interest in restructuring the roles themselves. Th ey would not, as an actual
decolonial project suggested, continue the reconstructive eff orts necessary
to make the last fi rst.
Doing so would require supplementing, broadening, and reconstructing
this initial nationalism with political, economic, cultural, and therapeutic
components. Guiding and emerging out of each and all was the normative
ideal of national consciousness.
Fanon fi rst argued for the indispensability of radically democratic par-
ticipation. Colonial relations rendered the vast majority of colonized people
political children, beneath citizenship, whose aspirations and anger were
irrelevant to determining the shape and direction of their polity. In antico-
lonial struggle, people, through fi ghting, made themselves subjects of their
own history, seizing responsibility for its present and future. Th ey had been
told that they were incapable of such agency and only able to understand
the language of force. Th rough collective decision-making, Fanon describes
the nurturing of the humanity of the people—their eyes and ears expanding
in a landscape befi tting their dignity.
But for governmental institutions to become a locus of belonging and
identifi cation, they had concretely to demonstrate that they connected one
part of the nation to the others through resource and infrastructural provision.
With the ousting of a community of settlers, many would hope that the
nation could be an authentic expression of that which was local. Th is would
lead many into an orientation of cultural retrieval, of seeking that which
was most traditional to this place. Th is quickly could devolve into battles
over which traditionalism was the purest expression of a people who now
in fact faced new and distinct challenges. While recognizing that Algerians
did indeed have a cultural past was essential to affi rming their humanity as
cultural agents, doing so more meaningfully required seeing them as people
who could together articulate living culture through which to forge a shared,
political world of the today.
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132 Fanonian National Consciousness
But the challenge of fi ghting for the emergent nation was not without
costs. Th e brutality of a reversed Manicheanism left scars, some of which
could not be undone. One did not want those traumatized by the battles
now empowered to run the country. One would need to be able to honor
them as appropriate and deserved while turning to the next generation to
develop new models for collective living that grew indigenously out of their
shared situation.
For Fanon, doing justice to the risks taken and lives lost in revolutionary
battle required ongoing, dialectical constructive work of cultivating a unique
scope of political identity, that of the nation, which could alone mediate
among class, regional, tribal, ethnic, and racial diff erences, by articulating a
past and future in which all were mutually implicated. Securing such sen-
sibilities did not only require prioritizing their cultivation but linking le-
gitimate political activity to the project of evenly distributed economic and
political development.
Fanon never diminished the diffi culty of this challenge: while insisting
that economic redistribution on a massive scale was urgent and essential
(lest societies be shaken to pieces), he was as unforgiving of the national
bourgeoisie for not putting themselves in the service of the people as he was
that they failed to become a genuine bourgeoisie: they did not revolution-
ize production in the local economy in ways that would upset the existing
global division of labor. If they had disproportionately to seize the nation’s
wealth in what amounted to thieving from governmental coff ers, they could
at least have refuted the role of Europe’s intermediaries, developing a dis-
tinctive, national model of what it would mean to be a capitalist class.
While Fanon clearly distinguished the possibilities of national conscious-
ness from the failures of a narrowed and increasingly cynical nationalism,
the former is more an evocative and challenging idea than one that is fully
fl eshed out. It is clear that national consciousness, as Rousseau’s general will,
seeks out and expresses what diff erent people have in common; that it moves
beyond an antagonism to foreigners which can quickly be redefi ned in a
xenophobic reductio ad absurdum. It is what enables and in turn nurtures
ongoing mobilization and is therefore hijacked and undercut by policies
that rely on the retreat of most of the citizenry into induced passivity. While
drawing on the cultural resources that all bring to the table, it seeks to com-
bine and fuse these into distinctive new national forms in an open-ended
constructive process that will be radically rejected by those who in power
plays for scarce resources claim that one version of traditionalism is the
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Fanonian National Consciousness 133
singular and authentic one that should dominate. It can fi nally only emerge
out of ongoing praxis—ever incomplete political, cultural, economic, and
explicitly therapeutic eff orts to reduce the causes of unfreedom—to make
political institutions more responsive, better loci and expressions of a con-
sciousness of what will cultivate national growth. Absent a sense of political
work as never done, the most recent period of mobilization will instead be
reifi ed into that which embodied “the nation’s” aims and identity and will
snidely be invoked by those able to frame the will of some as if it were iden-
tical with an actual general will.
Rousseau’s conception of the general will—while that which tried in the
most classically modern terms to insist that sovereignty could only belong
to the active citizenry and that governments, to be legitimate, would have to
make a task of seeking that which could be shown to maintain rough equal-
ity benefi ting the citizenry as a whole—gave little account, save turning to
a mythic legislator, of how a society with norms of legitimacy could emerge
out of contexts of illegitimacy. Instead Rousseau’s discussion, but for the
examples of Corsica and Poland, focused on legitimacy as an act of preserva-
tion, of maintaining rare conditions and fragile relations under which it fi rst
emerged.
In Fanon, national consciousness emerges only out of deliberate chal-
lenges to relations of subordination and alienation. Unlike in most cases
with Rousseau, in which the general will is simply there with little attention
to or interest in how it is constituted, in Fanon it takes shape through col-
laborative struggles fi rst to oust those people and interests fundamentally
opposed to the emergence of an indigenous citizenry’s will and then to move
beyond this to, as I have shown in Rousseau’s discussion of Corsica, creat-
ing institutions that would develop a nation that had been an appendage
to another metropolitan center. Th is was ongoing and dialectical, demand-
ing that each generation take on the next stage of responsibility, prizing
the devising of models that in refl ecting local needs could enable growing
aspirations.
In this way, Fanon’s discussion off ers much to the current debate in the
academic fi eld of political theory over “the paradox of politics” mentioned
in Chapter 3. Briefl y, this is a dilemma at the core of theories of popular
sovereignty. In Bernard Yack’s words, if “the people precede the establish-
ment and survive the dissolution of political authority, then they must share
something beyond a relationship to this authority” (2001, 524). If the legiti-
mate basis of their commonality must be civic, rather than racial or ethnic,
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134 Fanonian National Consciousness
we face the problem: institutions are supposed to refer to a body of citizens
who are to be defi ned through existing institutions. In Rousseauian lan-
guage, people would before the creation of laws be what laws were to enable
them to become. If a democratic people is rarely, if ever, democratically
created, and in fact resorts regularly to nondemocratic criteria to defi ne the
sovereign people, we might lament this and treat it as an impossibility in the
face of which democratic theory can only fail. Or we might see it as an inevi-
tability that can be made into an opportunity for ongoing political creations
that while always imperfect may, in the processes of their institution and the
triumphs and disappointments they generate, enrich democratic thought
and practice (see, for example, Frank 2010; Honig 2007; Näsström 2007).
Fanon’s account clearly affi rms the second interpretation, off ering some
distinctive considerations. Only to make use of “legitimate means” or meth-
ods within a colonial society would not only fail to challenge its more fun-
damental coordinates but in so doing would appear to condone or give
them the added credibility of appearing democratic. While engaging in
armed struggle breaks from any straightforward understanding of the fol-
lowing of democratic principles of constitution, here its central aim is to
reveal the ongoing violence structuring the society, challenging its use as an
instance of the rightful dispensation of force. Still the struggle that Fanon
describes is democratic to the extent that it is leveled against unfreedom,
uncovering structural inequalities, seeking to broaden who constitutes the
polity so that it better refl ects all implicated, even if this will require rid-
ding it of those most committed to maintaining oppressive conditions. Th e
boundaries of the emergent nation, as I have emphasized, are not based on
racial, ethnic, or religious membership but on a particular brand of commit-
ted, decisive, and divisive action in which anyone could in theory engage.
(Indeed, Fanon emphasizes that there are French men and women who join
the anticolonial cause while there are Algerians who resist it bitterly.) Fanon
stresses that while the emergent once-submerged nation is forged out of and
through disparate and connected actions, even then, it is essential constantly
to articulate what the diff erently located members of it have in common, to
creolize and generalize the collective will.
It is clear that while one could nurture national consciousness and that
it might even, in some instances, blossom, it functioned primarily as a nor-
mative ideal through which the larger aim of political legitimacy, of rela-
tions that were no longer fundamentally exploitative, might be clarifi ed and
understood.
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Fanonian National Consciousness 135
the right of the strongest normalized and contested
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He who believes himself
the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they. How
did this change take place? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I
believe I can answer this question” (Rousseau 1987, 141). So opens Rousseau’s
On the Social Contract and his meditations on the ways in which restraints
on liberty of individuals can, under particular arrangements, enhance their
freedom. Th e discussion, itself a portrait of the fragile possibility of “le-
gitimate and sure rule of administration in the civil order,” turns on two
points that I have already considered: that the “right of the strongest” and
its correlative “right of conquest” are incoherent and that the possibility of
communities in which disagreements are resolved politically require a set of
conditions that are diffi cult to create or sustain. Th ey rely indispensably on
an orientation toward diff erences that, while not aiming to subsume them,
assumes that they may be meaningfully negotiated rather than collapsing
into sedimented lines of battle.
Fanon’s account of forging an unfi nished alternative to political illegiti-
macy is oriented around these same crucial insights. Off ering a rigorous
conceptual reconciliation of principle and possibility, Rousseau’s sober grap-
plings do not hide their own paradoxes and limitations. Still, the resulting
refl ections remain primarily formal and addressed to an audience of other
Europeans. Fanon, by contrast, does not only argue that legitimate gover-
nance must emerge in and through political life and history; he also demon-
strates this claim in the very way that it is advanced. Speaking to the world,
he insists that it is in waging a dangerous and unpredictable battle against
one’s exclusion from the realm of political life that a more fully democratic
community emerges with a will and national consciousness. Any limitations
to full incorporation are not merely theoretical or strategic oversights. Th ey
will have lamentable and lasting consequences that pose ongoing obstacles
to approximating a fully represented and representative people.
Rousseau (1987, 143) says of force that it is a physical power to which peo-
ple surrender, not out of duty or an act of will, but as prudent. One can use
force to coerce obedience so long as others lack it. As soon as a capacity for
its exercise is in their possession, the roles reverse. Force can secure nothing
permanent on its own account unless it is used to create a compelling right
that moves us of our own will to obey. In the absence of this, one shakes it
off as quickly as one can.
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136 Fanonian National Consciousness
Fanon’s discussion begins with just such a predicament. Now neither hy-
pothetical nor individualized, it is the description of the very project of
maintaining a colonial society, one that aims literally to carve the world in
two. Particularly noteworthy is that unlike the European societies that are
Rousseau’s primary focus, where institutional investments are made in shap-
ing the aesthetic and moral character of those who do not benefi t from the
arrangement of life opportunities, the chains of the colonized are laid bare.
Apart from a tiny fraction that comprises an urban colonized pseudobour-
geoisie, no eff ort is made to manufacture or elicit what Antonio Gramsci
(1971) termed “spontaneous consent.” Rather than teachers and ministers,
those who mediate between the world of the colonizers and the colonized
are the police and the army. In an ironic turn comparable with the notion of
the “right of the strongest,” Fanon writes, “It is obvious here that the agents
of government speak the language of pure force” (WE, 38). Th e realm of
politics, classically understood, is one dominated by discursive negotiations
of disagreement; language and persuasion come to dominate precisely as
physical coercion and confl icts recede.
Force extends beyond the mere ubiquity of weapons and bloodshed, how-
ever. For Fanon the unqualifi ed brandishing of the use of force—including
statues commemorating settlers’ heroes as those there by dint of bayonets—
betrays a project of dehumanization, the only way through which system-
atized (in)human relations are normalized. Th e eff ort to create a neatly
Manichean world of noncomplementary compartments or fundamentally
opposed spheres that cannot be reconciled in a higher unity does not only
decimate former economic and material relations, but social and symbolic
forms as well. Writes Fanon, “Th e settler’s work is to make even dreams
of liberty impossible for the native . . . Th e appearance of the settler has
meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural
lethargy, and the petrifi cation of individuals” (WE, 93). Th e absence of any
eff ort to deal with the colonized as potential givers of consent illustrates un-
ambiguously: they are outside and beneath the relations of ruler and ruled
on which discussions of political legitimacy typically turn. Th ey would be
irrelevant to whatever might be presented as a general will, even though,
as we have seen in the previous chapter, this belies the very meaning of the
term. Any response of the colonized to this situation, save appreciative af-
fi rmation, is itself deemed as violent, since all other reactions involve a chal-
lenge to a status quo aimed at securing their unfreedom.
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Fanonian National Consciousness 137
Th e eff ort to render the discontent of major portions of the ruled irrel-
evant is not unique to modern colonial situations. After all, Niccolò Ma-
chiavelli (2005, 19) famously cautioned would-be princes that their greatest
danger was incurring the hatred of those they ruled. Fortresses built upon
loyal citizens and subjects supplied the surest protections against shifting
tides of fortune. At the same time, one could render the desire for violent
revenge irrelevant: Th is was easiest with people who did not yet know how
to live as free men. One had simply to destroy the entire bloodline of their
royalty. Th ose with memories of experiences of freedom posed a greater
challenge: Th e surest solution was obliteration. One could try as well to go
and live among them by forming colonies, separating and scattering them
so that they were too disorganized and poor to forge a collective threat. Hold
on, Fanon would say. He, unlike Machiavelli, is not describing Southern
Europe in the fi fteenth century but instead a France, supposedly remade
through Revolution, in its relations with the non-European world. Hence
his repeated references to the failure to forge a no longer colonial society as
leaving the colonized sleeping in the Middle Ages.
Th is slumbering is indispensable to preserving what could not be viable
if its subjects were not disoriented by a mummifi ed system of meaning-
ful references. Consider here a distinction made by Enrique Dussel (2008,
104–6) between what he terms “compulsion” and “violence.” Th e former, he
explains, involves the use of force grounded in laws authorized by represen-
tatives of the people. It includes sanctioned practices of stopping, detaining,
and holding people. Self-appointed individuals, by contrast, exercise the lat-
ter, in the absence of collective critical support. Fanon faces a challenge absent
in the writing of Rousseau, of convincing readers of the conclusion drawn
by those struggling for their liberation, that the ongoing unmasked force of
the settlers cannot be considered legitimate, but is instead worthy of the des-
ignation “violence.” Doing so challenges who and what constitutes “collec-
tive critical support,” “legitimate representatives,” and “the people” through
forging an alternative hegemony in which colonial endeavors are challenged
as a justifi able mode of economic development. Th e offi cial narrative of
French settlement, after all, is familiar to everyone implicated: Th e settler
makes history, is an absolute beginning and unceasing cause—if he leaves,
the country will be lost, dominated by antediluvian plagues and customs.
In the absence of a clearly formulated rejection of such renderings of co-
lonial history, the anger and counterforce of the colonized that should have
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138 Fanonian National Consciousness
been directed at an immediate “shaking off ” of the once stronger instead
targets their own. Part of the immobilization of the agency of colonized peo-
ple, their structurally induced collective pathology of liberty is that they can
only exist as human beings among themselves, but in each other and in ele-
ments of their own selves, primarily see sites of illegitimacy. In eff orts to act
with freedom within forcefully constrained conditions, they do so in ways
that challenge but are unlikely to alter any of the fundamental coordinates
of their condition: they reenliven feuds that preexisted the arrival of the col-
onists and ancestral spirits that are far more powerful than any Frenchman.
“By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta,” writes Fanon,
“the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that
everything is going on as before, that history continues” (WE, 54).
Redefi ning their foci of force or ceasing to commit collective suicide
requires an outright challenge to the force of settlers as violence. Dussel
emphasizes, here informed by Fanon, that the line delineating compulsion
from violence is contextually specifi c and fl uid, that struggle for new rights
“creates a new legitimacy framing prior legitimate compulsion as illegiti-
mate” (WE, 104–5). In so doing, the colonized assert themselves as political
subjects capable of normative assessments guided by their own trajectory to-
ward greater freedom. Dehumanization turns on a doubled and paradoxical
move, of deliberately refusing to see a human being in particular categories
of other people. Although Fanon acknowledges that the settlers know that
the colonized look on their living conditions with resentment and envy,
they remain shocked at the turn to violence on the part of the colonized,
even though this is a move made ordinarily by European countries faced by
threats to their sovereignty.
Recall that with Rousseau, the proper response to physical coercion is
simply to try to break free of it. At fi rst, in Fanon’s setting, decolonial vio-
lence follows exactly the Manichean logic imposed by the Europeans but
with the values inverted. “Th e native replies to the living lie of the colo-
nial situation by an equal falsehood . . . Truth is that which hurries on the
break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence
of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In
this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite
simply that which is evil for ‘them’ ” (WE, 50).
But this response, only initially adequate, is itself an interruption of an
induced immobility: the decision to end the position of Algeria as defi ned
solely by the history of colonization is to bring the nation into being. Fanon
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Fanonian National Consciousness 139
emphasizes, here as both a psychiatrist and revolutionary, that what is sig-
nifi cant about liberation, renaissance, or an emerging commonwealth is that
they are willed and demanded. A possibility before experienced only crudely
is forged deliberately as a program that is “clear to itself . . . in the exact mea-
sure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and
content.” Its advance is nothing less than the replacing of a category of na-
tive subpeople with agents of a shared and open present. Here Fanon breaks
fundamentally with the conservative (in the sense of aimed at conservation)
project of nation-building evident in Rousseau, who sought to recuperate
qualities that are essentially shared from their corruption through forces of
division.
challenging illegitimacy from the bottom up
But how do people, however imperfectly, refuse habituation and create the
polities they deserve? Fanon outlines what is involved with no romance. He
writes, “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nation-
hood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or
the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenom-
enon. At whatever level we study it . . . decolonization is quite simply the
replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without
any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution”
(WE, 35). Rejecting the lines of force that have structured the geography of
colonial society builds upon a nascent sense that while the colonized had
been overpowered, they had not been tamed. Having ingested the settlers’
story of their shared situation, they had not fully digested it. Fanon writes,
“In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking the native
when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white
man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock
these very values, insult and vomit them up” (43). If success entails the radi-
cal transformation of a social structure, this must manifest itself in what can
only be a historical process. Neither magic nor nature can substitute for the
meeting of two opposed groups whose relations were created and sustained
through violent coercion.
Th e colonized must claim themselves the equal of the settlers. What
makes this plausible is not simply the insistence that it is so. Instead, it is in
the moment of an actual fi ght that the colonized realize that they fi ght hu-
man beings like themselves; that the skin, breath, and heart of the colonizers
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140 Fanonian National Consciousness
share the fortitude and fragility of their own forms. Th is highly concrete re-
alization is transformative. Th rough it, the colonized conceive of themselves
as the match for the problems they face, capable of directly addressing them.
Grasping the lies at the core of the social rules that have forcibly regulated
their life movements, these easily begin to crumble: “For if, in fact, my life is
worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes
me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenter-
hooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him . . . I am already
preparing such effi cient ambushes for him that soon there will no way out
but that of fl ight” (WE, 45). People weighed down by their “inessentiality”
reemerge as “privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s fl ood-
lights upon them” (ibid.).
Th e metamorphosis must be collective, however, and the nature of the
emergent solidarity forged. Decolonization unites the people by a decision
to “remove from it its heterogeneity,” to unify on a national, sometimes
racial, basis. For native intellectuals who have imbibed and defended the
Greco-Latin pedestal as their own, these become lifeless, dead words. Th ey
are utterly irrelevant to the confl ict in which they are engaged. Languages
of individualism therefore are replaced with vocabularies of kin, family, and
trusted friends. For, as Fanon comments, “Henceforward, the interests of
one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discov-
ered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved.
Th e motto ‘look out for yourself,’ the atheist’s method of salvation, is in this
context forbidden” (WE, 47). At the start, this is genuinely a situation of
clearly designated lines dividing friend from foe, us from them. What has
been submerged as only a latent possibility, he writes, “requires that each in-
dividual perform an irrevocable action . . . You could be sure of a new recruit
when he could no longer go back into the colonial system” (84). In these
cases, he or she had broken with the existent order. To stop there would ren-
der each a traitor or terrorist. To be more they would have to continue on in
the building of a world for which their actions could be prefatory. In pledg-
ing to ensure triumph in his or her locality, each colonized man or woman
announced, that where he or she was, so was the nation. As new tribes en-
tered, this nation expanded, linking an increasing number of once discrete
villages into a larger chain of national and international action. Striking at a
shared enemy became the same as entering politics in an onward march of
resistance that was the growing of sovereignty.
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Fanonian National Consciousness 141
Rousseau introduced the fi gure of the lawgiver to enable a blind citizenry
habituated to corrupt and arbitrary rule to become the people who could
together articulate the general will. Th is fi gure must rid them of the problem
of emergence—of how they could, before the existence of good law, be the
people who could create it—by “transform[ing] each individual (who by
himself is a perfect and solitary whole), into a part of a larger whole from
which this individual receives, in a sense his life and his being . . . In a word,
he must deny man his own forces in order to give him forces that he cannot
make use of without the help of others. Th e more durable are the acquired
forces, the more too is the institution solid and perfect” (Rousseau 1987,
163). Bonnie Honig has stressed the signifi cance of the necessary foreignness
of this founding fi gure, that it proved an essential resource for responding
to dilemmas at the center of democratic life itself. Being from elsewhere “se-
cures for him the distance and impartiality needed to animate and guarantee
a General Will . . . because he is not one of the people, his lawgiving does
not disturb the equality of the people before the law . . . [he has no] known
genealogy [that] demystifi ed his charismatic authority” and there appears to
be some assurance that he will, after birthing the polity, leave (Honig 2001,
21, 23).
In Fanon, the equivalent political transformation is also reliant on for-
eignness. Th e estrangement, however, is not in the position of a singular
founder but is instead multiple. It entails discrete portions of the nation,
previously mutually foreign, substantively reencountering one another. Af-
ter describing the Manicheanism of colonial relations and the initial eradica-
tion of heterogeneity through armed struggle, Fanon therefore diff erentiates
among variably positioned members of colonized society. In particular, there
is an indispensable role to be played by native intellectuals whose European
training, suddenly appearing irrelevant to the shifting terrain, leave urban
centers to live among the peasantry who, in staunch contrast, have always
been prepared for dangerous action but need help in its “being educated.”
Th e marginalization of members of political parties by an organizational
politics too ready for reconciliatory promises build from these institutional
inadequacies a diff erent relation to the strengths and weaknesses of sectors
of the population who have been treated as peripheral to strategizing. In
particular, the lumpenproletariat who have left the impoverished country-
side only to bloat the urban periphery undergo a transvaluation. Th ere is of
course also Fanon himself, who connects instances of racialization between
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142 Fanonian National Consciousness
Africa and its diaspora, bringing psychological and philosophical resources
to participation in a struggle that enables him to develop a praxis that con-
tends adequately with societal madness with which he had dealt in individ-
ual patients. From Tunis and Algeria, he articulates for it and the world the
dream of a nation seeking to model the highest aspirations of humanism. In
other words, out of the species of “the native,” none are left unchanged. All
are touched by a telos that draws the so-called natives’ specifi c, indispens-
able experience and resources into a larger, moving unity that creolizes their
discrete points of access into a shared emergent will.
But if for Rousseau there are scales of economic disparity and forms of
religiosity that make the pursuit and maintenance of an enlightened gen-
eral will impossible, for Fanon, colonial relations prove an insurmountable
obstacle. A general will quite simply cannot emerge where the majority of
the population is violently rendered irrelevant to political life. In these cir-
cumstances, civil resistance and demands for inclusion are almost entirely
moot. Indeed the slogan of nonviolence—an attempt “to settle the colo-
nial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been
performed or irreparable gesture made” (WE, 61)—is that of the colonized
pseudobourgeoisie who share more with their colonial counterparts than
with their mobilized, primarily rural countrymen. Th eir preference is for a
continuation of the prevailing status quo. In sharp contrast, for those out-
lawed members of the group long perceived to be predatory pariahs, the
lumpenproletariat, it is their willingness to fl out laws increasingly seen as
illegitimate and violently to attack shared enemies whose presence is now
deemed fundamentally a crime that amounts to their “royal pardon” (86).
Although anticolonial violence is constitutive, binding “groups [that]
recognize each other [into a] future nation [that] is already indivisible” (WE,
93), throwing them in a shared direction that introduces into the conscious-
ness of each a sense of common cause, destiny, and past, Fanon’s discus-
sion of violence is sobering: Th ere is no alternative literally to seizing one’s
freedom, to fi ghting in self-defense for dignity that has been so mightily
challenged. Still, many of its consequences are unavoidably tragic. Revo-
lutions, even the most legitimate ones, involve monstrous moments and
highly imperfect decisions. Th ere is no doubt that the people responsible
for fi ghting for the possibility of a postcolonial condition will themselves be
irretrievably scarred. As Lewis Gordon (2008a, 122–23) has argued, they are
a generation that might be compared to the fi gure of Moses, leading others
to a promised land (and promised home) that they can and will not enter.
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Fanonian National Consciousness 143
Many among them will subsequently wonder, as did Rousseau, whether
they risked all they did for a future that intensifi es the very relations they
aimed to overthrow. Even then, their political adulthood does turn on re-
jecting relations that keep them locked in perpetual pupilage, outside of
the domain of mature self-rule and history. Th ey cannot but insist that le-
gitimate governance must refl ect a general will that makes it impossible to
ignore them with impunity.
In addition to repositioning themselves as having points of view through
which they can evaluate and judge colonial relations and conditions, anti-
colonial struggle also relatedly reopens the possibility of the colonized again
being sources of signifi cation beyond the imposed ossifi cation of Man-
ichaeism. Centuries of exploitation emaciate indigenous cultures eroding
them into “a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, a few bro-
ken down institutions” (WE, 238). Th ere is neither real creativity nor life in
these. “Th e poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of
culture are one and the same thing” (ibid.). In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon
explores how liberatory struggle creates an alternative to the two options
that colonialism imposes—to embracing its impositions as the present and
future or resisting through seeking refuge in a traditionalism of an artifi -
cially frozen precolonial domain. Th e process of deliberately challenging
coordinates of their freedom’s compromising reopens the corridors to new
forms of symbolic life. Indeed, writes Fanon, a “nation which is born of the
people’s concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the
people while changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of excep-
tionally rich forms of culture” (246). He illuminates this process through the
example of the changing meaning of the veil of Algerian women.
Depending upon the preoccupations of colonizing forces, certain cul-
tural elements take on vital signifi cance, expressing an overall attitude of
locals toward foreign occupation. With the veil, the response to the desires
of colonialists to tear it off was, on the part of many Algerian women, to
cling to it violently, even if they had not before, so as deliberately to create
a setback for colonists who in eff ect demanded complete and unrestrained
access to them.
Th is shifted with the outbreak of armed, anticolonial struggle and the
move toward total war. Male revolutionary leaders needed new strategies in-
cluding those that would put full confi dence in their mothers, wives, sisters,
and daughters who had previously primarily receded into private domiciles
as a last unoccupied terrain. Suddenly out of such confi nement, the same
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144 Fanonian National Consciousness
women quickly learned to remove the veil and don themselves as women
alone in the street. Disarming French guards with their casual sauntering,
they in fact only did so in order to transport a weapon or message pivotal to
a particular revolutionary mission.
Fanon emphasizes that such women were unable to undergo any period
of apprenticeship. Th ey were not playing a role they had read about or wit-
nessed. Instead they were creating the originals, literally the living proto-
types. Fanon observed: “Th ere is not that coeffi cient of play, or imitation,
almost always present in this form of action when we are dealing with a
Western woman. What we have here is not the bringing to light of a char-
acter known and frequented a thousand times in imagination or in stories.
It is an authentic birth in a pure state, without preliminary instruction”
(Fanon 1967a, 50). Fanon, again here with psychological insight, illuminates
the diffi culties faced by such women who must deliberately erode the image
of the occupier lodged in their minds. More, they must develop an entirely
diff erent phenomenology of the body:
We must come back to that young girl, unveiled only yesterday, who
walks with sure steps down the streets of the European city teeming
with policemen, parachutists, militiamen. She no longer slinks along the
walls as she tended to do before the Revolution. Constantly called upon
to eff ace herself before a member of the dominant society, the Algerian
woman avoided the middle of the sidewalk, which in all countries in the
world belongs rightfully to those who command. Th e shoulders of the
unveiled Algerian woman are thrust back with easy freedom. She walks
with a graceful, measured stride, neither too fast nor too slow. (58)
By contrast, Fanon emphasizes:
Th e body of the young Algerian woman, in traditional society, is re-
vealed to her by its coming to maturity and by the veil. Th e veil covers
the body and disciplines it, tempers it, at the very time when it experi-
ences its phase of greatest eff ervescence. Th e veil protects, reassures,
isolates. One must have heard the confessions of Algerian women to ap-
preciate the importance of the veil for the body of the woman. Without
the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put
adrift: the limbs seem to lengthen indefi nitely. (58–59)
When suddenly unveiled, her body appears to disintegrate: “She has an im-
pression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked . . . Th e absence
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Fanonian National Consciousness 145
of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporal pattern. She quickly has
to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control.
She has to create for herself an attitude . . . relearn her body, reestablish it in
a totally revolutionary fashion” (59). In her direct participation in the un-
cinching of colonial relations, the Algerian woman renders the symbol of
the veil fl uid. Th e world within which its meaning had been posited or chal-
lenged was itself no longer stable. First removed and then reintroduced as
required by strategies of struggle, the veil, rather than a charged individual
cultural element, became an instrument malleably employed to meet and
address newly emergent problems. Th e woman who employs it is herself
involved in the forging of a living culture tied to eff orts to articulate and give
substance to a general-will-in-formation.
“It is only in man,” Ernst Cassirer writes, “that the problem of possibility
arises” (1944, 56). Since human knowledge is by its nature symbolic, it must
distinguish between the real and the possible, the actual and the ideal. “A
symbol has no actual existence as a part of the physical world,” it instead has
meaning. While in most contexts, the elaboration of symbolic forms makes
“the distinction between actuality and possibility . . . become more and
more pronounced” (57), under special conditions, in which the function of
symbolic thought is impeded or obscured, Cassirer emphasizes, the “diff er-
ence between the actual and the possible becomes uncertain” (ibid.).
Th e maintenance of colonial relations relies on such impeding and ob-
scuring, the rendering uncertain of the diff erence between what is and might
be through suggesting that only one species within the larger category of hu-
man being is capable of symbolic thought and practice, while others can,
at best, respond to signals, perhaps aping, but in all cases diminishing and
corrupting properly symbolic forms. Repositing the relationship between
the actual and forging something other than colonial relations therefore
necessarily emerge together.
But progress, always imperfect and incomplete with real consequences
for the future nation, cannot be sustained by hatred alone. For one, hatred
entails an ongoing dependence on one’s enemy. It also leaves a recently awo-
ken people vulnerable to being cheaply bought off . Fanon observes, “Th e
native is so starved for anything, anything at all that will turn him into a
human being, any bone of humanity fl ung to him, that his hunger is in-
coercible, and these poor scraps of charity may, here and there, overwhelm
him” (WE, 140). However, these scraps of civility, Fanon emphasizes, are not
as they might appear. Th ey are not sudden acts of voluntary good will but
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146 Fanonian National Consciousness
instead extortions that signal that increasing effi cacy of resistance eff orts;
that the settlers are more and more on the defensive. Suddenly, now on the
receiving ends of the arbitrary brutality of violent relations, the colonial elite
reaches out to their pseudocounterpart among the colonizers, asking that
they reason with the rest of their own people. Th is is not, however, spontane-
ous recognition of the willing capacities of Algerians.
Still, making sense of this unsettled Manichaeism demands a less rudi-
mentary orientation, a capacity to distinguish, in particular, those among
the colonized whose resistance was little more than a Nietzschean will to
power, a resentful and reactive attack on those who ruled based in little more
than a desire to usurp them. Th eir project is to pursue particular and private
interests that cannot but collide with those of the rest of the nation for ulti-
mately, as Paulo Freire put it, they do not seek a genuine decolonization or
ridding the world of relations of oppressor and oppressed. Th ey simply want
to switch roles, leaving their structure intact.
Doing so defi nes one brand of nationalism, that which implies a “mini-
mum of readaptation,” a few reforms above and beneath an undiff erenti-
ated mass. Th is relies fundamentally upon the halting of political education
emerging from refl ective action, the receding of speech and discursive ne-
gotiation. Th is route, as we shall soon see, is most clearly embodied in the
local pseudobourgeoisie that Fanon describes as economically and socially
bankrupt. Imagining themselves replacing the colonial middle class, they
envisage their historical mission as playing intermediary between the out-
side world, particularly its corporations, and the newly independent nation.
Th ey can only think to imitate and so repeat, in exaggerated form, the in-
sults of former colonists. With them, the omnipresence of police and army
is reintroduced, now in African uniforms.
transcending the brutality of revolutionary thought
Although necessary, the initial throwing off of the occupying force was
not suffi cient for the emergence of an indigenous general will. It required
supplementing, broadening, and reconstructing the initial nationalism on
which such eff orts were based according to the normative ideal of national
consciousness.
First and foremost, this treated radically democratic participation as in-
dispensable. While taking active part in national liberation shaped a funda-
mental orientation against pacifi cation, mystifi cation, and a cultish reliance
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Fanonian National Consciousness 147
on leaders (WE, 95), the transition from “the status of a colonized person to
that of a self-governing citizen of an independent nation” was not immedi-
ate (138). Th e consciousness of the freedom fi ghter had not kept pace with
the effi cacy of his or her role within the larger organized force. Nurturing
understanding and refl ection was therefore itself a battle, especially against
those within the movement who would win now and educate later, who
feared that discussion necessary to the formation of shared public opinion
would be divisive. Fanon warns without qualifi cation: “Th ere exists a brutal-
ity of thought and a mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions . . .
if not immediately combated, [they] invariably lead to the defeat of the
movement within a few weeks” (147). For Fanon, it is not suffi cient for one
group of people wielding the “right of the strongest” or a will of some to
supplant the others. Instead an ending of colonialism must imply the cre-
ation of a diff erent set of relations, specifi cally, politically legitimate ones.
Th ese depart radically from understandings of development that uncriti-
cally rest upon stagnant majorities of enslaved and colonized people. In this
instance, Fanon makes plain, the nation can only develop as its citizenry
does. Th erefore effi ciency, if meaning the quick carrying out of business by a
slim fraction of skilled employees, would be a value discredited along with
the narrow individualism that proved unsustainable during the early stages
of violent liberatory struggle. In the project of decolonization, public busi-
ness must increasingly become the business of the public. Any other ap-
proach would quickly undercut its guiding aim: of the formerly colonized
“realiz[ing] that fi nally everything depends on them; that if [they] stagnate
it is their responsibility, and that if [they] go forward it is due to them too,
that there is no such thing as a demiurge . . . the demiurge is the people
themselves and the magic hands are fi nally only [their] hands” (WE, 197).
While there are reasons to challenge interpretations of Rousseau as an
advocate of participatory democracy since he so feared the potentially dis-
integrative eff ects of factions and described the process of voting for the
general will as listening, in silence, to the inner voice of G-d (rather than the
potentially manipulative and misleading arguments and counterarguments
of others), he also powerfully disparaged any easy declarations of what was
politically impossible. Emphasizing that the people’s sovereignty rests in leg-
islative power that must remain active through their ongoing periodic as-
sembly, he writes, “Th e boundaries of what is possible in moral matters are
less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices and our prejudices
that shrink them. Base souls do not believe in great men; vile slaves smile
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148 Fanonian National Consciousness
with an air of mockery at the word liberty” (Rousseau 1987, 195). Th e last
census of Rome counted four hundred thousand citizens bearing arms and
an empire of four million citizens. Yet people were called together regularly
to deal with public business in what Rousseau considered to be meaning-
fully democratic activity.
For Fanon, nurturing such capacities and orientations, like Rousseau,
would require ongoing opportunities for practice and, here unlike Rous-
seau, a vision of the task of political parties that far exceeded the progressive
role played early on in articulating dreams of the emergent nation. Fanon
writes: “Th e citizens should be able to speak, to express themselves, and to
put forward new ideas. Th e branch meeting and the committee meeting
are liturgical acts. Th ey are privileged occasions given to a human being
to listen and to speak. At each meeting, the brain increases its means of
participation and the eye discovers a landscape more and more in keeping
with human dignity” (WE, 195). Seductive short cuts of every variety would
have to be stringently avoided in cultivating fully conscious human beings
rather than a slim set of exceptional leaders for whom the meaning of the
nation would quickly shrink. Fanon insists that isolated individuals may
refuse to grasp a problem, but that, soon before, entire groups and villages
had understood diffi cult challenges with great rapidity. Government lead-
ers ready to surmise that the citizenry were incapable of understanding the
complex work of self-governance would do well to recall how capable, in the
mist of revolutionary struggle, these same individuals had shown themselves
to be. For Fanon states clearly, “the party is not an authority, but an organ-
ism through which they as the people exercise their authority and express
their will” (185). Th erefore those who claimed that they could not explain
a given political matter to the people in fact did not want to and so would
turn to obscuring and technical language as a mask because their actual aims
required hiding. Political education would have to replace mere inculcations
of inspiring slogans. Its aim, after all, was “not to treat the masses as children
but to make adults of them” (181). Since the “more the people understand,
the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that fi -
nally . . . their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding
of their interests” (191).
In situations like these, Fanon emphasizes, “the important thing is not
that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but
that the whole people plan and decide even if it takes them twice or three
times as long” (193). For the future is a closed (or manipulated) book if the
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Fanonian National Consciousness 149
consciousness of the people is not enlivened. Th is would not happen imme-
diately, but could not be overlooked since these “weaknesses which are the
heritage of the material and spiritual domination of the country by another
is a necessity from which no government will be able to escape” (WE, 194).
In perhaps the most extreme example of what it is to cultivate indigenous
agency and skill, Fanon declares that if building a bridge does not enrich the
awareness of those who construct it, they can go on swimming across the
body of water. He states, “Th e bridge should not be ‘parachuted down’ from
above; it should not be imposed by a deus ex machina upon the social scene;
on the contrary, it should come from the muscles and the brains of citizens”
(201). Th ere would certainly be times when even foreign engineers and ar-
chitects might be needed, but local leaders would have to be present as they
did their work “so that the new techniques [could] make their way into the
cerebral desert of the citizen.” Concerns about national prestige could never
upstage priorities of “returning dignity to all citizens, fi ll[ing] their minds
and feast[ing] their eyes with human things, and creat[ing] a prospect that is
human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein” (205).
Such humanizing endeavor turned on the deliberate cultivation of a
unique scope of political identity, one through which diff erences of class,
region, ethnicity, and race could be mediated in the form and project of
the nation. Nurturing the existence and vibrancy of the sensibilities that
could make such dialectical work viable would need to be a priority itself
facilitated by an ongoing sense of a shared past and future in which every
emerging citizen would be mutually implicated.
Fanon comments that during the revolutionary struggle no one could es-
cape scot-free; everyone would be butchered or tortured. Everybody would
be compromised in the fi ght. No one would retain clean hands. Th ere would
be no innocents. If there were any onlookers, they were cowards or traitors.
Th e challenge was to replicate this framework in the independent nation,
to assure that neither harm nor privilege would be experienced in isolated
pockets. Fanon therefore implores his readers to forge their own models,
ones that are not simply pale duplications of those of Europe. Mocking the
social contract tradition, he states, “No, there is no question of a return to
Nature” (WE, 314). Instead for everyone’s sake, the task is to work out new
concepts and try to set afoot a new man (316).
Crucial to these, and here in a very Rousseauian spirit, is to render the
totality of the nation a reality for each citizen, making its history part of his or
her own. If national, such experience would “cease to be individual, limited,
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150 Fanonian National Consciousness
and shrunken” (WE, 200). Just as the fortune of the nation was in the hands
of each fi ghter within the armed struggle, “the period of national construc-
tion each citizen ought to continue in his real, everyday activity to associate
himself with the whole of the nation and to will the triumph of man in his
completeness here and now” (200–1). Fanon writes, “Th e living expression of
the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the
coherent, enlightened action of men and women. Th e collective building up
of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale” (204).
But for political identity and governmental institutions to emerge as loci
of belonging, they had to demonstrate concretely that they connected one
part of the nation to the others not only in speech and aspiration but also
through resource and infrastructural provision. Fanon therefore argued that
it would be essential that the Algerian people develop a clear sense that
they together owned the soil and mineral wealth of the country. At the
political economic level this fi rst would require nationalizing the economy
through wholesale and resale cooperatives run on a democratic basis, decen-
tralized so as to involve as many people as possible in public aff airs. Th is,
Fanon explained, had been abandoned in capitalist countries that governed
with law backed only by economic strength and the police. In addition, as
Rousseau also had suggested with Corsica, the nation’s capital would have
to be remade and deconsecrated. Party members would not reside in the
capital, which inevitably would lead to the widely observed trend toward
overpopulated and overdeveloped centers fl ooded by people who left poorer
regions abandoned. It would be necessary to privilege the interior rural areas
politically, to seek out every opportunity for contact with rural masses and
to make national policy for them, in an eff ort to recognize and remain in
immediate touch with those who fought for independence.
A future for politics, rather than the reintroduction of relations managed
by force that enabled the uninterrupted profi teering for some, required a
people who recognized themselves as essential to its operation and health.
As soon as they were made dispensable to ruling, normalized violence de-
fending a partial hegemony would reenter. Sustaining a counter vision
demanded framing the growth of people as citizens as a guiding telos and
priority. When politics is understood not as generating uniquely human
resources and relations but only as the administration of scarce resources
among necessarily antagonistic parties, it cements rather than rendering
fl uid lines of force that were outcomes of previous battles.
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Fanonian National Consciousness 151
Th e national government must be for and by the people, and Fanon adds,
also for and including the outcasts. No leader can be a substitute for a popu-
lar will. “Th e search for truth in local attitudes is a collective aff air . . . for
the success of the decision that is adopted depends upon the coordinated,
conscious eff ort of the whole of the people.”
hijacked possibilities
Th e aftermath of eff orts to give concrete form to a formerly colonized gen-
eral will is disappointment. Rousseau himself had been ambivalent about
the question of revolution. Although his writings inspired insurrectionary
activity from the French Revolution to that of Fidel Castro, he feared that
many eff orts at political reform in fact enhanced the chains under which
people lived; that whenever change was deliberately sought in the hope of
expanding freedom, the few with a practical sense of what would come of
the transformations were the ones who had worked out how fi nancially to
profi t from them. For Fanon, the national bourgeoisie did precisely this.
Hijacking the revolution while invoking what had been shared nationalist
terms, they became increasingly snared in narrow tribalisms that masked the
ultimate failure: their determination that national consciousness remain an
empty shell.
Rather than the “all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of
the whole people,” the national bourgeoisie, argues Fanon, were content,
actually adamant, that it stay “a crude and fragile travesty of what it might
have been” (WE, 148). As a result, once the focus on bringing an end to defi -
nite abuses was complete, tragic mishaps emerged. Th is congenital problem
was due largely to the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, in
particular “its spiritual penury” and the “profoundly cosmopolitan mold
that its mind is set in” (149). Fanon writes:
Now, precisely, it would seem that the historical vocation of an authen-
tic middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own
nature in so far it as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is the tool
of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary
capital which is the people. In an underdeveloped country an authentic
national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray
the calling fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the
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152 Fanonian National Consciousness
people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and
technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial
universities. (WE, 150)
Instead of this heroic and potentially fruitful path, the national bourgeoisie
retreated into a cynically pseudobourgeois existence. Completely ignorant
of the local economy, they could not speak with specifi city about the nation’s
minerals, soil, or mines. Th ey would instead talk cultishly of small-scale ar-
tisanry and about the groundnut harvest, cocoa crop, and olive yield. Th ey
were, Fanon lamented, satisfi ed to continue as Europe’s farmers, generating
unfi nished products in ways that would never shift the global division of
labor inaugurated by colonization, on the one hand, and black and brown
enslavement, on the other. Lacking the entrepreneurial, pioneering aspects
of the early European bourgeoisie, Fanon balks, they were “already senile
before [they have] come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will
to succeed of youth” (WE, 153).
Th ey did not even consider creating factories that could generate wealth
for the nation and themselves. Risk averse, they preferred the security of
foreign banks in which they could invest their profi ts from native soil. And
yet they would speak constantly of nationalism while transferring the unfair
advantages once possessed by colonialists into their own hands.
Th is is not an “authentic movement of nationalization” (WE, 157), Fanon
comments. Although invoking the prioritization of that which was local,
the national bourgeoisie “prove[d] themselves incapable of triumphantly
putting into practice a program with even a minimum humanist content”
(163). Bandying about phrases from European treatises on morals, they were
a direct obstacle to the emergence of the general will: “Th e peoples of Af-
rica have only recently come to know themselves. Th ey have decided, in
the name of the whole continent, to weigh in strongly against the colonial
regime.” By contrast, in seeking to make their own narrow fortunes, the
national bourgeoisie became direct obstacles to “the path of this ‘Utopia.’ ”
Th ey “have decided to bar the way to [the] . . . coordinated eff ort on the part
of two hundred and fi fty million men to triumph over stupidity, hunger,
and inhumanity at one and the same time” (164).
Th is is not, however, only a failure in ideas. In the failure to off er an
elaborated conception of viable lives within the emergent nation, there is a
“falling back toward old tribal attitudes” (WE, 158). In such instances, Fanon
writes, “the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to
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Fanonian National Consciousness 153
the state. Th ese are the cracks in the edifi ce which show the process of ret-
rogression, that is so harmful and prejudicial to national eff ort and national
unity” (148–49).
Although once expressing concern with the dignity of the country, the
national bourgeoisie now inhabited and maintained colonial homes and
business offi ces. Th ey did not remake rural and urban divisions or recast
the global map, but simply settled into a world whose terms were still de-
termined from outside. When they spoke of the nation it was as a cyni-
cal recourse in order to make claims to that which they feel entitled. As
they temporarily demonized the outsiders to whom they in fact remained
beholden, local artisans and craftsmen fought with nonnational Africans
in what erupted in racial riots. Th e chauvinistic language of the local elite
echoed out of less fortunate mouths in religious rivalries compounded by
ethnic ones in what amounted to one more way of arguing in a condition
of scarcity for why one uniquely deserved what should be available to all.
“From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and
fi nally to racism” (WE, 156). Fanon is unequivocal: such directions are “the
historical result of the incapacity of the national middle class to rationalize
popular action . . . to see into the reasons for that action” (149).
African unity, an idea that brought immense pressure against colonial-
ism, required the cultivation of political economic conditions for its pos-
sibility. In the absence of these, it crumbles.
Th ese diffi culties are only augmented by political leaders who refuse to
challenge the national bourgeoisie. “Far from embodying in concrete form
the needs of the people in what touches bread, land, and the restoration of
the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his in-
ner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profi teers
impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie” (WE,
166). Government jobs swell, but only for the sake of employing newly
found cousins rather than in bursts of responsive activity.
Literally bringing the people to a halt, sending them back to “their caves,”
such leaders now, argues Fanon, expel them again from history, attempting
to pacify them into sleep, waking them only occasionally ritually to recall
the colonial period and distance from there that had supposedly been trav-
eled. Th e masses in general, however, are treated as a blind force that must
be held in check by mystifi cation or fear. Embryonic oppositional parties
that might think otherwise are “liquidated by beatings and stonings,” by
prison sentences that lead them to silence and marginalization. Th e masses,
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154 Fanonian National Consciousness
Fanon insists, see through the purely symbolic nationalist celebrations. Th ey
may now be Africans, but they are hungry ones.
Claiming not to want to endanger national unity, such leaders refuse
to draw up a set of objectives. Any such program with detail would be
divisive—“the militants [therefore] disappear into the crowd and take the
empty title of citizen. Now that they have fulfi lled their historical mission of
leading the bourgeoisie to power, they are fi rmly invited to retire so that the
bourgeoisie may carry out its mission in peace and quiet” (WE, 171). Th ey
begin to sulk and “turn away from the nation in which they have been given
no place” (168). Much as Rousseau says of assemblies that neither ask about
nor in fact discuss the general will, these citizens begin to lose interest in it.
Having not been enriched by “consciousness of social and political needs,
in other words into humanism” this nationalism “leads up a blind alley”
imprisoning national consciousness in “sterile formalism” (204).
Th e strength of the police force and army become proportionate to the
stagnation in which the nation is sunk. As with colonial relations, mediating
between great wealth and great poverty are the “pillars of the regime,” the
army and the police force, still advised by foreign experts. Th e behavior of the
national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries, suggests Fanon, is remi-
niscent of a gang “who after every holdup hide their share in the loot from
the other members who are their accomplices and prudently start thinking
about their retirement” (WE, 174). Th is leads to expressions of discontent
which are arbitrated more and more harshly, through ever more brutal dis-
plays of force. Th e hands of these army men, “cleverly handled by foreign
experts” (ibid.), will gain more and more control with the implication that
the former mother country now simply practices indirect government.
Th is exemplifi es what Enrique Dussel has called the fetishizing of power,
or those instances in which individual representatives exercise power in fa-
vor of some and therefore cannot rest on the strength of the people but
instead need the help of imperial powers to help produce obedience. Th eir
shortcomings do not only entail the failure to fulfi ll normative principles, he
emphasizes, but also contribute “to the weakening and rotting of power and
of actions and institutions through which he or she governs” (WE, 57).
In other words, for it to be apparent what “the diff erences have in com-
mon” they must together form a society that shares in prosperity and despair
and that is meaningfully bound by a common destiny. Such generality is
not simply a function of will but also of active policy that would make such
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Fanonian National Consciousness 155
willing reasonable. Rather than addressing the limitations of the liberation
movement, those who come to power exacerbate them.
As Dussel (2008, 80) has emphasized, even the noblest commitment to
symmetrical, democratic participation and legitimacy will be imperfect and
relative. To treat this as a challenge rather than a justifi catory excuse turns
on the constant reinvention of the institutions through which the power
of communities of people is exercised. Settling for mechanisms that fail to
fulfi ll their purpose of responding to demonstrated needs is one of the clear-
est marks of the usurpation and then abandonment of forging an alterna-
tive model of nationalism, one based in a national consciousness. In other
words, the resurgence of ethnic, religious, and regional lines as those only
of nonnegotiable diff erence is a direct refl ection of the deliberate shutting
down of the project of creating a heterogeneous political culture in favor of
the sedimentation of relations that enables the enrichment of a small few,
the national bourgeoisie, over and against others—a situation in which a
will of some is all that will prevail.
Th is is a clear abandonment of what Rousseau termed “generality” and
the national consciousness that Fanon sought to nurture. For both men, it
was in their pursuit alone that legitimacy might emerge from politics.
concluding considerations
Fanon’s formulation of national consciousness sustains all of the features
that make the idea of the general will compelling while, if not transcend-
ing its limitations, productively reexamining them through a creolized lens:
both Rousseau and Fanon challenge the adequacy of mere proceduralism,
the sense that to tally votes itself constitutes a democratic outcome, but in
Fanon the general will is not discovered but authored with an emphasis on
assuring that the highest of collective aspirations are thoroughly understood
by everyone implicated. In Fanon’s account the aim is not to try to emulate
the work of G-d here but instead to forge models of a shared future realizing
that we alone can create the conditions of our own political adulthood or
insist on our own ongoing relevance to public decision-making. Th e general
will for Fanon is not articulated by each citizen in isolation rekindling a pre-
political unity, away from the infl uence of manipulative, dogmatic voices,
but emerges out of the deliberate seizing of power, the direct challenging
of unfreedom, with risks that make it impossible to turn back. Th is puts
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156 Fanonian National Consciousness
great weight on the deliberative side of Rousseau’s general will, a side that
introduces its own manifold dilemmas. In the face of these, Fanon makes
contemporary Rousseau’s discussion of more partial wills that create ob-
stacles for clearly grasping the general will. If for Rousseau smaller, more
partial general wills can form within societies and sustain intense loyalties
that interfere with identifying interests as large as society itself, for Fanon
these kinds of divisions usually run along ethnic and religious lines and are
a symptom of political failure, of a retreat into a crude and narrow national-
ism that amounts to the abandonment of creating genuinely postcolonial
relations that rely upon the maximizing of the possibilities of evening out
distributions of resources and political attention.
Grappling with the political stagnation following the independence pe-
riod in Ghana, Kwame Gyekye (1997) treats the relationship of force to
legitimacy as a living question fundamentally intertwined with the creating
of viable multinational states. He too affi rms that the absence of fl uid and
dynamic cultures out of which a shared nation might form is an unmis-
takable consequence of abandoning the state’s primary role as contributing
through redistributive measures to the forging of a coherent, diverse nation.
Continuing the project of setting the material and moral conditions for na-
tional consciousness therefore requires prioritizing the formidable challenge
posed by ethnic and religious group identity lines, some preexisting, most
reifi ed by colonialism.
Gyekye emphasizes that many internal groups are “nations” in the sense
of minority cultures that are not coterminous with a state. Th ey share cul-
tural and linguistic homogeneity, life worlds structured around values and
mundane feelings of loyalty, solidarity, and belonging. Th e challenge in
multinational states is how to emulate these living senses of community in
larger units, transferring thick allegiances of this sort to a larger and seem-
ingly more abstract whole.
In an absence of fairness in the distribution of resources and opportu-
nities, just as Fanon had said, constituent groups are suspicious of a gov-
ernment that appears to be a removed instrument wielded by some over
and against others. If, by contrast, it were associated with the provision of
roads and schools and medicine that in enfranchising some connected them
with others, perhaps what is deemed politically possible would be rather
diff erent. In other words, according to Gyekye, the seemingly unshakable
understanding of lines of loyalty and allegiance in cultural, ethnic, and re-
ligious terms is neither preordained nor primordial. Instead it remains a
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Fanonian National Consciousness 157
function of an absence of sustained political will to forge an alternative locus
of belonging.
Gyekye stresses that the successful combining of parts into a cohesive
whole is not achieved through mere aggregation but through creolization:
He compares the envisioned metanational state with the construction of a
political home, “but the structure, that is, the house, that results from the
composition is a unity; but not only that: it is also a new thing, which is
neither a stone nor sand nor wood” (1997, 85). It will surely initially be expe-
rienced as artifi cial precisely because, while a human community, it must be
purposively built, drawing on cultural and linguistic resources rather than
reproducing them uncritically. Still, Gyekye qualifi es, all eff orts to nurture
human growth require care and refl ection and although surely entailing
struggle, the forging of a viable national infrastructure is a precondition for
protecting the dignity of the entire citizenry. Th is is precisely what politics
does aim to achieve: to forge out of distinct and shared needs and aspira-
tions entities that are not natural but general.
Advocates of ethnicism, here like Fanon’s narrow nationalists, actively
discourage the personal and offi cial recognition of the actual existence of
shared cultures that, crossing subgroup boundaries, have emerged out of
ongoing practices of living together that would serve as the model for con-
structing metanational cultures. After all, these are not pluralisms that col-
lect and multiply internal diff erences without their alteration. Instead they
provide an umbrella for them while seeking actively to forge a shared he-
gemonic culture by identifying underlying affi nities of potential value and
discouraging those that could only seed nonnegotiable divisions. Much like
Dussel’s “analogical hegemony,” which, through dialogue and translation,
builds from criticisms of prevailing national identities articulated by co-
extensive social movements, seeking to reveal their relations to each other
while retaining the distinctiveness of each, the aim is “a world in which all
worlds fi t,” in which distinctiveness sustains rather than eroding unities.
Such a vision turns on at least two stipulations: the fi rst is that in deliber-
ately forging an alternative modernism, one that does not rely on dehuman-
ization, there are elements of cultures and traditions that will be lost. Most
of the time, these are ways of acting and thinking that refer to elements of
social worlds that no longer exist. But there are, in addition, those that privi-
lege some at cost to most others without liberating cause. In other words,
the preservation of a general will cannot tolerate everything. Th ere are cus-
toms and practices that it could not sustain lest they shatter its conditions.
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158 Fanonian National Consciousness
While advancing a compelling case for new models and defi nitions of
individual and collective development, Fanon stressed making one’s polity
its own center without collapsing into a conservative localism that would
antagonize non-Algerian Africans or suggest that independence must come
from the work of the hands of the formerly colonized alone. To leave the
colonized with their own bootstraps, even if the formal demand of decolo-
nization, would represent a failure of the triumph of precisely the alterna-
tive hegemony that it sought to sustain. Really to convince the world of the
violence of colonization would in addition to requiring a steady retreat of
French men and women also necessitate a reinterpretation of the restitution
owed. He wrote, “If conditions of work are not modifi ed, centuries will be
needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level
by imperial power” (WE, 100).
Methods used by agents of capitalism to increase their wealth and power
included deportation, massacres, forced labor, slavery—in short, the strate-
gies of war criminals. Really to value black and brown lives as one did those
of Europeans would entail the kinds of postwar demands made of Nazis for
their treatment of other parts of Europe. Th e moral reparation or symbolic
power of national independence could not alone feed the recently liber-
ated. And the “wealth of the imperial countries is [the wealth of Algerians]
too . . . [after all] Europe is literally the creation of the Th ird World. Th e
wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdevel-
oped peoples” (WE, 102). To continue on as if nothing were due, as if there
were not in fact a reversed relation of indebtedness of France to Algeria, was
to continue on within an imperial hegemony that would treat the legacies of
colonialism borne out in such material discrepancies as a lamentable inevita-
bility, a consequence of compulsions of economic growth.
One can diagnose illegitimacy by active indications of the indispensabil-
ity of dehumanization to the maintenance of a given order. Th e degree to
which an alternative is legitimate is measured by how extensively people have
seized and are then able to set conditions in place to shape, together through
action, the contours of their collective lives. Th is process is necessarily in-
augurated by untidy struggles within history against those who would treat
a people’s will, agency, and even hatred as irrelevant. Th ese mollify former
dividing lines as people, facing great potential losses, ally to throw off the
structures that violently shape their lives. But anger and resentment can-
not alone sustain a diffi cult battle—this requires a constructive project, the
forging of a positive, analogical hegemony, one in which what is right and
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Fanonian National Consciousness 159
consented to coheres in what the diff erences have in common. Th is requires
a dialectical movement between the shared and the diff erent—the formula-
tion of the latter to make the former more rigorous and the refusal for the
latter to undercut the grounds of the former. Th is involves the expansion of
the discursive domain in a deliberate eff ort to curb unnecessary recourses
to violence that by defi nition shut sectors of the population outside of poli-
tics. Doing so reminds us of the actual meaning of power and requires that
all people can remain awake and occupy a shared time. Within it, no one
would remain as the undivided mass, marking time (WE, 147).
Rousseau, if in a neutered form, has been canonized within French so-
ciety—the source of the legitimating language of the very project of the
French Republic. Fanon, by contrast, is much studied—by those who oc-
cupy or identify with positions of alterity. Th e response to recent challenges
to the inadequacy of the hegemony that sustains the identity of the French
nation has largely been discredited as sowing divisions that would destroy a
shared political community. In such rhetoric, 1789 is invoked, now conser-
vatively. A more viable and political response would be to call for the cre-
olizing of Rousseau’s general will drawing on the ample resources off ered by
Frantz Fanon. Such an approach would seek out the debates through which
diff erence could move from an abstract principle to lines of disagreement
fostered by the unequal reach and provision of the French state.
Th is would of course also require the historicizing of the political com-
munity as one that did not emerge out of a hypothetical state of nature of
isolated individuals but instead from political and communal relations that
have enlarged the freedom and wealth of some through the dehumanization
and rendering irrelevant of others. It is in identifying such limitations and in
struggling against them that a diverse, French (meta) national consciousness
or the general will is made more rigorous and less imperfect.
Th ere are remarkable similarities between the accounts of legitimate poli-
tics in the work of Rousseau and Fanon and the fears in each that these
aims might be obscured by prevailing perceptions of authoritative social-
scientifi c methods. Each insists that what renders one acceptable in pro-
fessional academic circles may well make it impossible to grasp reality in
ways that could inform virtuous, political action. For each, the possibility
of legitimate political life turns on eradicating cultures of dependence that
make seeing and expressing the general will impossible. Both insist that
the general will involves identifying what the diff erences of a polity share
while refusing to reify distinctions that have taken form and become tena-
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160 Fanonian National Consciousness
cious through a lack of political possibility. For both Rousseau and Fanon
the alternative to decadent culture is politically-legitimate-culture-in-the-
making or, in the case of Fanon, one in which rather than negotiating life as
a minefi eld of controversial elements that one embraces or rejects, one can
be the source of meaning and value as one forges a less compromised version
of the common good. Such shared well-being for both requires economic
conditions that are not so radically unequal that all political argumentation
turns on rationalizing such diff erences as natural and necessary. Challeng-
ing unfreedom is work that is never fully or fi nally accomplished and may
indeed lead us into predicaments even more replete with both diffi culty
and disappointment, but our eff orts alone affi rm that we are human beings
capable of political adulthood.
Rousseau’s idea of the general will has been attacked as totalizing, roman-
tic, and repressive and as turning on a capacity for clear and transparent
willing that regular citizens do not, in fact, possess. Still, its vision of politi-
cal legitimacy has moved and captured the imagination of many readers by
suggesting the requirements of modern, legitimate, democratic life. Several
genealogical lines have been drawn from Rousseau’s classic formulation of
the general will to fi gures that both embrace and reject such relations of in-
debtedness. Th e most central in contemporary mainstream political theory
are John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. And yet, as I have suggested, it is in
conversation with Frantz Fanon that the irredeemably political dimensions
of Rousseau’s writings are resuscitated.
Rousseau oscillates between radical irreverence and cold feet—for in-
stance, unveiling the illegitimate bases of most modern polities while sug-
gesting that once corrupted, polities cannot be reformed; insisting that all
people ultimately seek liberty while insisting that people in some climates
were not capable of institutionalizing it. Overemphasizing such passages,
however, can obscure the record of Rousseau’s challenging the compliance
of generations of readers with the compromising of their freedom—whether
through urging them not to too readily accept the necessity of political rep-
resentation or of mistaking scholasticism for thinking. His scathing criticism
of modern European life inspired not only Immanuel Kant and G. W. F.
Hegel, but also ordinary citizens yearning to create political communities
that could mirror unities within social life.
Fanon brought maturity to these analyses, the insight of the psycholo-
gist, and a sober sense that nature off ered no idyllic refuge. Fanon, after all,
would have regretted the failure of Algeria to become no longer colonial
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Fanonian National Consciousness 161
even in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle. Still, this, for him, would
never have served as a refutation of the need for people to act with agency in
history. It would instead affi rm that questions of political life could never be
settled once and for all. He was willing unambivalently to embrace the full
implications of his work and to seize practical possibilities that he inspired
his readers to identify. Fanon therefore fruitfully historicizes and reworks
Rousseau without ever collapsing into what can be read in the latter as mo-
ments of conservative nostalgia. Fanon’s political thought instead is a high
modernism, a modernism from below, that insists that we alone can be the
source of political models under which we live.
In politically living cultures, practical reason dominates and ideas are re-
sources for people who, as sources of signifi cation, interpret what make their
worlds meaningful. In a world as diverse as ours, these designs will have to
be heavily creolized.
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162
5
Th inking Th rough Creolization
Th e awareness of mixed origins does not mean that individuals can spontaneously retrace
the fl ows that contributed to shaping their current practices and environment. Indeed, the
long-term impact of cultural imports is often proportional to the capacity to forget that
they were once acquired or imposed. . . . How many Italians today do not see the tomato as
an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage? How many Native American leaders would dare
to reject the horse as culturally foreign? . . . [W]e could prolong the list interminably in a
number of directions: Latin America without Christianity, India without English, Argen-
tina without Germans, Texas without cattle, the Caribbean without blacks or rum, England
without tea. . . . Culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global fl ows that
started in the late fi fteenth century and continue to aff ect human populations today. Yet the
history of the world is rarely told in these terms. Indeed, the particularity of the dominant
narratives of globalization is a massive silencing of the past on a world scale, the systematic
erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history through-
out the globe.
—michel-rolph trouillot
Th us far, I have argued that Rousseau’s challenging refl ections on questions
of human inquiry, political illegitimacy and its alternatives remain highly
relevant to the present and are considerably enriched and extended in the
work of Frantz Fanon. In other words, the central ideas produced through
Rousseau’s eff orts to make sense of his shifting world are taken up by Fanon
and altered to grapple with the continuous and distinctive predicaments of
Martinique and then Algeria. One thereby witnesses a radical critique of the
ways in which the project of European modernity implicated everything in
its orbit, including what could function as authoritative scholarship, move
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 163
from an at times desperate longing for that which was gone to deliberate
eff orts to forge a modernism from below, in which aspirations of popular
sovereignty, collective self-determination, or willing for all, even within im-
perfect and constrained conditions, are embraced in pursuit of living mod-
els of what could be a more humane world. While a conversation between
Rousseau and Fanon might appear to a particular brand of historian as an
undisciplined fusion of disparate genealogies, such a conception of rigor
would obscure the vital ways that each might fruitfully illuminate the other,
recentering the political concerns that informed both.
Having off ered this example of creolization—of the repositing of ideas
in Rousseau to think through and make sense of the political situation in
the Caribbean and then North Africa in a blend that produces something
simultaneously recognizable and wholly new—I now turn to a discussion of
creolization more generally as a potentially fruitful approach to theorizing
today.
Against a postmodern ethos that has overtaken many communities fram-
ing inevitable repression in all eff orts to construct collectivities, I aim, in
the spirit of Sheldon Wolin (1960), who defi ned the task of political theory
as articulating interests as general as political society itself, to reenvision
the conditions for just this task. If unable to fashion genuinely universal
theories, creolization can help us to engage in universalizing thought or that
which facilitates the seeking of concepts and aspirations with what Molefi
Asante (1998) has termed greater transcultural validity. Moving beyond dia-
logue of respectful diff erence, which none of us should denigrate, we instead
explore creating ways in which otherwise fragmented accounts of shared
political, physical, and geopolitical spaces could and do combine. I will
suggest that the impetus and resources to do this emerge out of theoretically
engaging modernity’s contradictions, or the locations and sites in which
widely shared ideals collide with their compromising.
What merits the recentering of the descriptive concept of creolization?
Why prioritize a phenomenon that emerged from sites of study long deval-
ued as marginal—“not Western” enough for sociologists, not native enough
for anthropologists (Trouillot 1992, 22); insuffi ciently savage or too hybrid
in Munasinghe’s (2006) critical assessment—as prototypes for understand-
ing the postmodern human condition (Palmié 2006, 343) or predicaments
marked by heterogeneous, stratifi ed convergences of displaced people? Is it
an asset or a liability that the idea aimed to illuminate the nature of illicit
blendings or forms of mixture that were not supposed to occur? Finally, how
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164 Th inking Th rough Creolization
can I urge you to consider “creolizing political theory” as an approach when
instances of creolization explored in what follows in fact emerged not as
express aims, not out of a project of celebratory merging of diff erence for
its own sake, but instead when those positioned unequally together found
terms through which to coexist or when members of discrete groups sharing
political grievances developed mutually intelligible language to describe that
which needed to be surpassed?
Indeed when explicitly sought as a political program, creolization is often
conservative and much more like multiculturalism than its advocates would
ever allow. Instead processes of creolization emerge most in instances like
those I considered in Chapter 4, when the coeffi cients of particular sym-
bolic elements become fl uid because the settled coordinates of the world to
which they referred are radically interrupted. Th e emergence of alternative
hegemonies then do not come out of deliberate eff orts to build them but
instead by rejecting the commitments that would render creolization impos-
sible in struggles to seek out political policies that could better approximate
something approaching a general will.
creolization as an accurate portrait of the workings of culture
Th e most infl uential of political theories root their accounts of desirable
models of political life in an account of the human beings who would to-
gether constitute them. Indeed, Carl Schmitt once observed that the “prob-
lematic or unproblematic conception of man is decisive for the presuppo-
sition of every further political consideration, the answer to the question
whether man is a dangerous being or not, a risky or harmless creature”
(1996, 58). Others have suggested that such orientations are themselves
overdetermined, a mirrored refl ection of the political fortunes into which
each theorist was born. While this assessment is reductionistically causal,
it is undeniable that many of the most fruitful disagreements in political
theory are not over a respective theorist’s method but over the assumptions
and commitments with which he or she begins—his or her view of the na-
ture or condition of human being.
A similar set of observations might be made of the treatment of culture.
Much recent political theory, especially that which engages questions of dif-
ference and recognition, begin with observations about the nature of cul-
ture, identity, and identifi cation. While some frame “the culture” of dispos-
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sessed or marginal groups as their most treasured resource and its treatment
as the ultimate index of the fortunes of the people itself, others see collective
designations that describe or prescribe shared habits, customs, and norms as
largely repressive and totalizing and aim to reduce their hold on the practical
lives of subjects by challenging the adequacy or coherence of their meaning.
Such debates are largely oriented around qualifying or critically engaging
one of two defi ning poles that I will suggest creolization has and will ef-
fectively mediate.
In what is an all too familiar terrain for many contemporary political
theorists, there is, on the one hand, the camp associated with the politics of
recognition and multiculturalism of Canadians Charles Taylor (1994) and
Will Kymlicka (1995). On the other, there are the poststructuralist chal-
lenges as well as those of critical theorists, the latter perhaps most promi-
nently represented in the writings of Seyla Benhabib (2002).
In the former, one envisages culture, much like one would an individual
language, as determining the means with which one makes sense of the
experiences that determine who we are and what we might become. While
cultures are, on this view, internally varied and changing over time, they
remain distinct wholes with unique attributes that deserve formal, political
eff orts to ensure the conditions for their ongoing preservation. Guided by
avowed principles of toleration and of recognizing and honoring diversity
as consistent with liberal democracy, this approach defends treating separate
cultures much like nations that deserve to be (somewhat) self-determining.
For them to preserve their authenticity, they require degrees of isolation that
sustain their ability each separately to enrich the larger national community.
Each is therefore to be left to defi ne its guiding purposes or ultimate aims,
so long as none collide with the liberal political framework that organizes
and sustains this arranged order.
Although reminiscent of nineteenth century conceptions of the relation-
ship of culture to nation, race, and language, the multicultural movement
emerged within the Anglophone political world of the 1980s and 1990s,
taking on some of the strategies and tactics mobilized in the civil rights
movement, while avoiding more oppositional forms of direct collective ac-
tion (Song 2007, 67). Undertaken in a less inclusive age, marked by disin-
vestment from welfare state models and the charting out of what fl owered
into neoliberalism and neoconservatism, culture, in these models, is treated
much like other forms of property—with clearly demarcated boundaries
and measurable value that can be trespassed upon or unjustly seized rather
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166 Th inking Th rough Creolization
than a set of interrelated and mutually constituted responses to a shared, if
unequal, set of life conditions.
Many have criticized what is often termed this “strong multiculturalism,”
for framing culture as a self-acting agent that expresses itself and its internal
laws and logic while its members act passively, determined more or less by
it. Far from a transparent and univocal system of meaning that claims the
spontaneous allegiance of its members, according to their critics, customs,
practices, and ideas refl ect the balance of power among their diff erent ad-
herents (Parekh 2000, 79).
Th ese concerns inform the second prevailing view of culture, evident, in
the main, in poststructural brands of feminist and postcolonial studies. In
these accounts, cultures are marked by ongoing, internal contestation, and
rather than monolithic, they are polyvocal, fl uid, permeable, and constantly
renegotiated, exemplifying as much internal diversity as is evident between
what are diff erentiated as distinct traditions. Central to such formulations
is the focus on hybridity and on bordercrossers in the work of Homi Bhabha
(1994) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Both focus on particular groups and
individuals who, in their individual persons, combine, blur, and remain in
between what are often treated as fi rm and decisive boundaries with corre-
sponding importantly transgressive epistemological insight.
When challenging poststructuralism’s extremes, Nikolas Kompridis (2005)
suggests that what has emerged from it is an antiessentialist orthodoxy or
essentialist antiessentialism that exaggerates the permeability of culture to
the point that it would be impossible to recognize anything as a shared set
of customs or traditions or to explain why people might wish to choose
to pass on any of their particular features. If the accounts of Taylor were
unable to explain how cultures change, in other words, critical theorists
following Benhabib cannot explain their continuity or why anything but a
radically individualistic relationship to all systems of meaning is reasonable.
Both such accounts are excessive, if in opposite directions, failing adequately
to capture the combined nature of that which they describe, which Ernst
Cassirer (1944) accurately defi ned as the both conservative and transforma-
tional, if to diff erent degrees in discrete domains and moments, dimensions
of symbolic life.
When off ering an example of an alternative view, one that I would call
creolization, Kompridis off ered the example of Bela Bartok’s ethnomusico-
logical fi ndings. Th ese exemplifi ed the ways in which culture, more gener-
ally, is both identical and nonidentical with itself: When Bartok sought to
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archive what he feared was disappearing authentic Hungarian folk music,
he instead found that it was very much alive. However, the indigenous mu-
sical form had survived through being altered—remaining what it was by
becoming something new. In it, he discovered “the crossing and recrossing
of cultural styles, genres, and materials, which, with each crossing and re-
crossing, were newly and individually infl ected” (Kompridis 2005, 338) in
ways that Bartok knew would infuriate those seeking essential purities as the
basis of nationalist identifi cation. Blended were discrete elements, those au-
dibly Hungarian and suffi ciently sedimented to sound distinctive and “the
highly melismatic ‘long song’ of Persia, Iraq, “Middle-Algeria, Old Ruma-
nia, and the Ukraine.” It was very unlikely that these had each developed
independently of the other, but who was to adjudicate the singular, “true”
source? What surprised Bartok was that each of the contributing elements
(Arabic-Persian, Eastern-European Hungarian, and Central European) be-
longed to a distinguishable genealogy that could be detected in its new and
transformed combination that was “incontestably Hungarian” (ibid.).
We might add as additional examples of what I am calling creolization
when James Tully (1995; 2008a; 2008b) refuses to frame the governing chal-
lenge as asking again and again what it is that established, hegemonic politi-
cal societies can and cannot accommodate of the practices of more marginal
groups, instead insisting that already complex and contested mainstream
political cultures should be equally transformed in such confrontations.
Beyond monological struggles for recognition, we must move beyond the
abstract evaluation of the compatibility of minority claims with liberal com-
mitments to recognizing that none transcend the fi eld of struggle in which
norms of intersubjective relations are crafted. In his brand of democratic
constitutionalism therefore one cannot, as is the norm in much Haber-
masian critical theory, allow certain foundational principles to remain out-
side of the bounds of negotiation. In suggesting that the norms that defi ne
the intersubjective relations that constitute collective life should refl ect on-
going deliberations of all implicated parties, he is describing the deliber-
ate and active creolization of political life. In it, any abstract rule, however
noble, must be made locally meaningful or indigenous in ways that refl ect
the changing makeup of the polity. Th is demands, of course, that interests
and needs connected to antagonistic political locations in fact fi nd points of
sustained commonality and mutual comprehension. In such an alternative,
one would not in moments of adjudication turn only to the intellectual
resources of John Locke or John Rawls to ask what ideas that emerged in
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168 Th inking Th rough Creolization
seventeenth-century England or twentieth-century United States dictate as
the necessary response. One would as readily consider the potential useful-
ness and insights of concepts, ideas, and resources of challenging parties.
It is in precisely this spirit that Drucilla Cornell has lamented that as
progressive as the new South African Constitution has been, it remained
within the framework that Tully criticizes, one in which integration pre-
sumes that those outside of the minority-majority culture assimilate into it
with, at best, some domains for minority rights, or particular problems and
dilemmas that can be resolved under separate “customary” auspices. Cornell
commented that the better alternative, especially if the aim was genuinely to
constitute a postapartheid state, would have been to draw on the full range
of local traditions, forming a distinctive new combination that would bring
together the culminations of legal refl ection expressive of diff erent, often
hostile, locations within a shared polity. Th is is also what could be meant
if one were to say that evident in Western Europe is a desire to resist the
creolization of their polities in ways that would refl ect their changed demo-
graphics, or the impressive presence within them of people from a range of
their former colonies.
It is easier to resist the logic of creolization when nation-states think
of themselves as only semipermeable, capable of monitoring (even if im-
perfectly) who it is that could enter and exit. It is far more diffi cult when
boundaries appear thoroughly porous and sovereignty necessarily relational,
sub- and transnational. If creolization emerged to describe radically new
forms of life that emerged out of the shrinking of the globe in the age of
revolutions, as Africa, Europe and the Americas convened in the waters,
ports, and territories of each, we face a similar situation now in which little
can or will remain in near isolation. None can avoid being resituated in a
global age, especially if its unfolding contours are not entirely clear.
In such circumstances, many seek to impute to culture a barrier or line
of defense against a homogenizing global market that, even while turning
them into market niches, threatens to endanger the internal signifi cance of
local peculiarities. As I have shown in Fanon’s discussion of the turn to tra-
ditionalism, many wish to retreat into the narrow refuges within which they
can continue to govern the conditions of their lives. If consistently blocked
from doing so outwardly in the public sphere, these eff orts are implosive; as
the domains shrink they become fortresses to be ever more desperately pro-
tected. In such circumstances, creolization, rather than the process through
which political worlds better refl ect the many people who comprise and
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 169
make them meaningful, appears as dilution, as one more loss. Perhaps sadly,
even then, its avoidance is not completely possible: one cannot but negoti-
ate what it is that one will reject and how. If rootlessness has been said to
describe New World conditions in which prototypical examples of creoliza-
tion fl ourished, we must consider the range of processes that produce such
untethering: In addition to literal transplantation, there is of course the
uprooting and unrooting created when the earth itself trembles.
In this closing discussion, I contend that this combination of closure
and openness, of sedimentation and fl uidity, and of particular forms of
identifi cation gaining coherence through their recontextualization is pre-
cisely what “creolization” in its descriptive modes has successfully captured.
In off ering a better account of the nature of the reality in which political
life proceeds and our theory is oriented, we would do better systemati-
cally to refl ect on it and to have it inform our work and method because
the framework for understanding culture advanced by theorists like Taylor
continues to fashion how it is that we conceive of the meaning of disci-
plines themselves.
Even so, it is worth emphasizing again from the outset that in many of its
prescriptive uses (here barring the recent work of a philosopher like Michael
Monahan [2011]), creolization has stood for that which Kompridis chal-
lenges, for an ideal that might crudely be useful as a regulative ideal in the
domain of artistic and literary creation, but that is incoherent and easily ma-
nipulated with destructive consequences when we speak of societies more
generally. Rather than making such a prescriptive move, I instead suggest
more modestly that using creolization as a lens will prove highly fruitful.
descriptive creolizations in its social scientific mode
Recall that although the fi rst written use of the word creole dates back to the
1500s to name people of mixed blood (Chaudenson 2001, 8), creolization
emerged in its descriptive mode in the nineteenth century to explain what
were seen as unique and aberrational human symbolic forms borne of plan-
tation societies primarily in the New World, but also within comparable
situations on the coasts of Africa and Asia where trading outposts similarly
brought enslaved Africans in contact with Europeans in lands either ab-
sent indigenous populations or nearly cleared of them through genocide. In
all such instances, previously unconnected people—a colonial class, slaves,
dwindling indigenous populations, and subsequent waves of laborers—
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170 Th inking Th rough Creolization
whose mutual recognition was unprecedented, were thrown together in
violently unequal relations, threatening any and all existing orders of collec-
tive meaning. Out of these sudden ruptures, new perspectives, based largely
in reinvention, resituating, and mistranslation began to take shape (Buck-
Morss 2009). What distinguished creolization from other more familiar and
ongoing forms of cultural mixture were the radical and intensifi ed nature
of the interchange of symbols and practices that constituted the encounters
among displaced groups of individuals who were neither rooted in their new
location nor able meaningfully to identify with great civilizations elsewhere
(Eriksen 2007, 155). And yet they were there together to stay. Rather than a
spread of coexisting parallel direct transplants, though these did also remain,
new combinations of once disparate meanings took on degrees of stability
and standardization charting a distinctive genealogy, newly indigenous to
the place.
Against the grain of once conventional scholarly wisdom, the cultural
forms and meanings were neither evidence of Africans stripped of their cul-
ture and singularly acculturated into European ways of acting, as some pre-
vious accounts had suggested, nor of Africans enveloped in ossifi ed, if pure,
remnants and retentions from the mother continent. Instead, in the midst of
extreme brutality, those who unequally occupied such societies did not re-
main sealed off from each other but lived within relations marked by mun-
dane dependency and antagonism, by intimate and complex interpenetra-
tion (Gilroy 1993, 48–49) that belied the project to create more Manichean
worlds explored in Chapter 4. In these relations of proximity, older habits,
customs, and forms of meaning-making were not only retained or rejected
they were resignifi ed in an “embattled creativity” (Mintz 1998, 119) that, in
the language of Stuart Hall, enables us to envision how “the colonized [also
produced] the colonizer” (1999, 6).
Th e invaluable mirror that laboratories of creolization off ered for un-
derstanding how it is that shared symbolic forms emerge out of internally
diff erentiated and unequal communities formed through sudden migration
and displacement was not lost on linguists. Although there were many for
whom such mixtures represented exceptionally lamentable cases of dilution
and corruption, for others they off ered a rare opportunity for studying more
universal processes. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, some
European linguists turned to creolized languages to resolve debates over how
Latin had developed into multiple, distinct European tongues (Chauden-
son 2001, 14; Meijer and Muysken 1977, 27). Aiming to determine how
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 171
substratum languages contributed to the specifi c ways in which target lan-
guages were spoken, even in mastery—one could think here, for instance,
of the English spoken in Scotland, on the one hand, and Puerto Rico, on
the other—Lucien Adam suggested that just as creole languages were non-
European languages with European lexical items, Romance languages had
combined a Latin lexifi er with the variety of substratal vernaculars spoken
throughout Europe. Similarly, Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927), who fi rst
studied Basque and then the Mediterranean lingua franca spoken in North
Africa until eradicated by French, challenged the system of mapping the
descent of languages into family trees as practiced by the neo-grammarian
school of Leipzig. Turning to pidgins and creoles as his prototypical exam-
ples, he insisted that these discredited the adequacy of prevailing classifi ca-
tory schemes that restricted each language to one unique genetic originating
point. Creole languages and, he implied, perhaps most others, could com-
bine multiple lexifi ers and substrates in relations that needed to be illumi-
nated rather than obscured when delineating such genealogies.
Following in this tradition, but now in refuting the designation of creolized
languages as windows into the nature of early humanity or as indispensable
examples of otherwise inaccessible models of protohuman development,
are the French and Congolese sociolinguists Robert Chaudenson (2001) and
Solikoko Mufwene (1998) who instead argue that creoles pose and illuminate
the hardest of linguistic questions, those that should be the concern to all
students of language since they push to their logical conclusion evolutionary
tendencies observable in all tongues (Chaudenson 1989). In other words,
the processes at work in the development of creole and noncreole languages
are not structurally diff erent. Instead regular processes of both, in the case of
creole languages, are radically quickened due to “greater ecology-prompted
restructuring than in less heterogeneous and more focused settings of lan-
guage transmission” (Mufwene 1998, 7).
Th is sociohistorical approach therefore traces the emergence of Franco-
phone creoles to a specifi c series of conditions or periods of contact that
prompted the transmission of restructured elements of language. Th e fi rst of
these was a period that, following initial sporadic intracommunal contact,
brought together relatively homogenous, rural, primarily poor French work-
ing for companies and landlords who spoke nonstandard varieties of French
with mainly very young slaves who were integrated into such homes in a
deliberate project of deculturation. Th is quickly produced a mulatto popu-
lation that largely spoke French or approximations of it (which combined a
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172 Th inking Th rough Creolization
nonstandard French lexifi er with their own substratal tongues). With the ex-
tension of agricultural industry and intensifi ed reliance on slave labor, newly
arrived Africans came to form a majority. Th ey were largely segregated as
fi eld laborers with limited direct exposure to Europeans and the languages
they spoke (here called acrolects), and their contact was mediated by mulat-
tos, who were both local and seasoned slaves, and their language (called
a mesolect). Within slave communities the mulatto approximations of the
French of their masters (often also family members) were approximated in
a process called basilectalization through which core features of their me-
solect combined with additional substratal languages that were themselves
mixed. As creole slaves were radically outnumbered, the language was fur-
ther reconstructed creating a more complex linguistic continuum between
the standard nonstandard French lexifi er and various creole forms. Linguists
of this camp, especially Chaudenson and Mufwene, insist against prevailing
orthodoxies, that while basilectical forms are assumed to be the oldest, the
opposite is true: creoles are initially closer to their lexifi ers; distance in fact
grows with social conditions of greater separation or isolation marked by
and associated with autonomized elaboration.
Chaudenson and Mufwene emphasize a few additional points key for
refi ning analogies that we will draw between the creolizing of languages and
of disciplinary forms: First is that while creole language situations off ered
exceptionally good conditions for observation and study (as relatively closed
settings undergoing recent change with dates, demographic, economic, and
social dimensions that can be determined) the models they suggest can be
used to explore other symbolic domains by similarly emphasizing their par-
ticular sociohistorical features. In none of these does one see a simple or har-
monious mix of elements of coexisting prior systems. But in more than any
other, the domain of language in colonial societies is defi ned by a centripetal
force of the dominating group. Although, even in this account, language
development is multidirectional—creole languages are not only the result
of approximations of approximations based on early contact, mediated
contact, and then resituation, they are restructured in ways that more sub-
stantially refl ect the mediation and negotiation of the variety of substratal
tongues of speakers for whom, in the face of ongoing infusions of linguistic
diversity, the creole emerged as a lingua franca—it is less so than with music
and dance, the production of food and homes, religion, or medicine. Th e
particularly unequal relations of infl uence in the linguistic domain should,
however, be born in mind when we consider the historical absence of cre-
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 173
olized philosophical and theoretical work in terrains where the vast majority
of other aspects of symbolic life are so clearly marked by these processes.
Still, on the question of language, what is frequently overlooked when
creoles are described as the fruit of abnormal processes of transmission is
that no native or fl uent speaker entirely possesses or acquires a language.
Outside of scholastic systems, it is relevant communicative needs and one’s
social environment that determine the aspects of a language that one learns.
One is not introduced to the system of language but to vocabulary and par-
tial rules through which one infers and through trial and error develops some
competence. One’s aim is rarely either to create or master a language but
instead to use it either to enable or perhaps obfuscate processes of commu-
nication (Mufwene 1998, 5). In addition, it is misleading although frequent
when studying linguistic development to focus on converging communities
when in fact contact, negotiation, and innovation usually took place in in-
dividual encounters that collectively produced language (not entirely unlike
the ways in which individual acts of reproduction aff ect the larger species)
(6). Finally, degrees of restructuring, including repetition and codifi cation
of imperfect replications, or simply errors, are a feature of all spontaneous
language transmission, even within communities of native speakers. What
distinguishes creole languages is more frequent imperfect feature replication
(due primarily to limited contact with speakers of the superstrate language)
and more rapid and extensive restructuring than in communities that are
monolingual.
Perhaps most signifi cantly, what sociohistorical studies of creole languages
demonstrate is how language is “fundamentally implicated in relations of
domination,” that control over representations of reality is both a source of
social power and a site confl ict and struggle (Gal 1989, 348). In other words,
in linguistic interactions—including those of approximation, imperfect rep-
lication, and restructuring—one does not merely witness the refl ection but
the constitution of social organizations; the enacting of social stratifi cation
and identity by the mediating of microinteractions and macrosciocutural
formations (Irvine and Gal 2000, 36). Susan Gal (1989, 349) emphasizes that
scholars of language have suggested that resistance to dominant representa-
tions occurs through the ongoing use of denigrated linguistic strategies and
genres that propose and/or embody alternative models of the social world.
I would contend that most creolized speech did precisely this: what went
under the name of imperfect replication (of already imperfectly replicated,
nonstandard versions of European languages) was the ongoing infl uence
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174 Th inking Th rough Creolization
of substratal languages of subordinated groups. Th is put plantation owners
and their European patrons in a bizarre situation: if seeking to use indig-
enous forms of expression, they were those that defi ed arguments about the
incapacity of slaves to be independent sources of signifi cation, to make hu-
man meaning of hostile circumstances.
My claim is not that creolized people or languages or food are themselves
intrinsically progressive nor that against claims that slaves were completely
determined by their enslaved condition, these off er unambiguous evidence
of an elusive and suddenly humanizing “agency.” Instead, these forms reveal
a set of complex and refracted processes that more generally characterize the
nature of symbolic life, illuminating in a fresh way the more familiar Marx-
ist maxim that human beings make their own history, but not exactly as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves
but under those directly encountered, given, and transmitted. Where the
specifi cally creolizing discussion departs, however, is with the place where
Marx’s passage ends: “Th e tradition of all the dead generations weighs like
a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Th is is precisely, for better and for
worse, what is absent in these circumstances. Even for those who might
wish for and prefer such dead weight, its reinsertion required a deliberate
project of reinterpolation. Even then it was resituated within an ongoing
project of people with diff erential degrees of access selecting elements of
a shared past drawn upon for their relevance to a current situation. In the
resulting products one witnesses that while conditioned powerfully by their
circumstances, those who endured were not reducible to them. Th e terms
of their situation, while decisive, could be transcended, but, even then, were
necessarily made intelligible through symbolic forms that simultaneously
assumed continuities and the birthing of shared language for forging alli-
ances through which these might be overturned (Johnson 2003).
In all of these instances and in most other descriptive social scientifi c
work, creolization is used retrospectively to capture a fait accompli. Indeed,
as the opening epigraph suggests, “the long-term impact of cultural imports
is often proportional to the capacity to forget that they were once acquired
or imposed” (Trouillot 2003, 34). So creolization names the uniqueness of
Jamaican Patois or Haitian Creole; the music one hears throughout the
Caribbean or the Cajun food now local to Louisiana. In each are evident
the full range of contributing sources which, given prior political histories
would not have been expected to converge, that in their combination repre-
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 175
sent both continuity and something radically new. Among their noteworthy
features are:
1. Elements that are brought together are not translated back into the lan-
guage or symbolic framework of the one who does the borrowing. Th ey are
instead incorporated. One tries in vain, for example, to fi nd an English equiv-
alent for the Jamaican word ratid; one simply learns how to use it. Such acts
of incorporation, however, are not necessarily without the transculturation
that Michaelle Browers (2008) and Pratt (1992) correctly have suggested we
need not lament. Evident here, in other words, is an immediate break with
those strands of comparative political theory for which mistranslation is of
particular concern. In instances of creolization, rather, an idea, linguistic
form, or ingredient with one origin is often willfully resituated with mean-
ingful implications. Th is is why Raquel Romberg, for instance, has urged
theorists of creolization to rethink the neat distinction between creativity
and imitation, suggesting that at the core of creolized Caribbean practices is
“the strategic unauthorized appropriation of symbols of power . . . against
their initial purpose” (2002, 1) or, as Michel de Certeau has suggested, em-
ploying hegemonic forms of culture for ends foreign or antagonistic to them
(1984, xiii).
2. One can, even within what has emerged as a new form in its own
right, trace the contributory origins (themselves often highly syncretized)
of elements that now converge. Th is is precisely why many listeners fi nd
Haitian Creole so remarkable: audible are not only sounds they associate
with France but those of the Niger-Congo region; they hear each of these
discretely enough to name them separately and the distinctness that is their
combination. Th e conditions of the creolized product will eventually be
forgotten, as Trouillot has emphasized, but within environments character-
ized by valuing or making creolization central to their self-identities, one
witnesses a greater awareness of the permeable and forged nature of all sym-
bolic forms. Patterns of mixture are therefore valuable mirrors into rela-
tions that structure a given society and its availability or lack of access to
social, economic, and political upward mobility: A particular group that
is still relatively marginal to the national political community may signifi -
cantly mark another domain, say, that of food or music. While one does
not want to diminish the signifi cance of either—indeed turning to them is
thoroughly consistent with the prescription that we not assume in advance
to know the domains within which the philosophical insights of specifi c
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176 Th inking Th rough Creolization
communities were most richly developed—a legacy of the colonial world is
the relative comfort of many whites with black and brown contributions in
these domains as opposed to more explicitly discursive, political, and intel-
lectual ones. In this sense, a group may have signifi cantly contributed to the
symbolic life of a given community without possessing the equivalent power
to defi ne its guiding ultimate aims. Or, as with Victor Turner’s category of
the liminal (1995), one may inform the defi ning of contours of hegemonic
self-understandings without being able to direct how they are mobilized.
3. As should be evident from the prior point, framing instances as those
of creolization requires a particular approach to the study of the past. Fre-
quently creolization describes forms that have become relatively stable, even
ossifi ed, especially in those circumstances in which their marketability is
linked to their branding and commodifi cation as creole. Th e larger point,
however, is that the expectations with which we approach prior historical
moments are signifi cantly shaped by how we conceive of symbolic life and
its relationship to patterns of human movement. Particularly creolized forms
can therefore themselves, if we are willing to grapple with them, belie ways
of narrating the past that impose on them a de post facto purity. Th e history
of radical antislavery organizations and of the Haitian Revolution off er a
good example: Both were thoroughly transnational, with half of the slaves
who fought in Haiti born in Africa; leaders and replenishing waves of new
slaves coming in from other Caribbean islands; abolitionists of various alle-
giances entering from various elsewheres, including from the United States
and Europe. In a context in which most who fought and led were illiterate,
their lingua franca was Creole (Fischer 2006, 371–73).
4. Creolization does suggest an intensity of interaction, a much more
than casual cohabitation of social and political worlds, opportunities for
which are typically furnished by fresh bouts of voluntary or coerced migra-
tion. However, situations that render creolization likely may also be due to
changes that do not involve crossing dramatic geographic distances but that
are also described in spatial terms, for example, the movement of cultural
or religious outsiders up or down the class ladder may lead to individuals
among them more consistently or intensely interacting with members of
communities with whom their previous relations had been at best distant.
Th eir sudden proximity then raises anew very old questions of what in the
lives of others to incorporate, mimic, or reject. Th e fl ipside of this is also im-
portant: often what are considered the most authentic forms of a creolized
language are those that have sedimented precisely because the encounters of
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 177
people that initially produced them have signifi cantly dwindled due to more
extensive racial segregation or isolation (as evident in our previous discus-
sion of Chaudenson and Mufwene) as a result of changed social norms or
economic mandates or through the abandonment of eff orts to assure that
benefi ts distributed by local, national, or regional governments are equitably
dispersed.
But perhaps most signifi cantly, unlike the multitude of other forms of
cultural mixture and syncretism, creolization has referred very explicitly
to illicit blendings (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confi ant 1990) or to those that
contradicted and betrayed the project of forging a Manichean racial order
in the heavily mixed, transnational movements that shaped the plantation
societies of the New Worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular,
diff erently from cultural mixture, in which it is assumed that members of
distinct groups will take an idea derived from abroad and make it local in an
ongoing process of give and take, what is unique about what is now termed
creolization is that it refers to instances of such symbolic creativity among
communities that included those thought incapable of it. Racialized logics
forged in European modernity suggested a necessary relationship between
one’s blood as evident in one’s phenotype and one’s relative ability to be the
source and custodian of a culture, civilization, and language. Cultural mix-
ing described the interactions of those on comparable rungs. By contrast,
what came later to be called creolization described what at the time of their
development were seen less as new syntheses than as a unilateral corruption
or erosion of cultural life that necessarily originated elsewhere.
One example can illustrate this point succinctly: Guus Meijer and Pieter
Muysken (1977) explain that European languages were thought to contain
morphological distinctions and syntactic categories that supposedly simple
black and brown people were unable to emulate. If, as nineteenth-century
linguistic hybridology claimed, diff erent races belonged to varied evolution-
ary stages, with contact, their linguistic templates cross-fertilized at the low-
est common denominator of structural complexity with the more primitive
grammar of lower race speakers imposing an upper bound or limit (DeGraff
2003, 395). It was, wrote Pierre Larousse in the Grand Dictionnaire of 1869,
this stripping of linguistic sophistication that created creoles (cited in Meijer
and Muysken 1977, 22). He off ered this defi nition: “Th e creole language,
in our colonies, in Louisiana and Haiti, is a corrupted French in which
several Spanish and gallanicized words are mixed. Th e language, often un-
intelligible in the mouth of an old African, is extremely sweet in the mouth
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178 Th inking Th rough Creolization
of white creole speakers” (ibid.). Pieter A. M. Seuren more recently argues
that Creole grammars lacked the “more sophisticated features of languages
backed by a rich and extended cultural past and a large, well-organized liter-
ate society” (1998, 292–93). Others still described Haitian Creole simply as
“nothing but French back in infancy” (DeGraff 2003, 392).
One might argue that this more racialized dimension of historical discus-
sions of creolization is no longer evident in or relevant to eff orts to make
the concept contemporary; that we live in a period in which race and nation
are not treated as synonymous and that the expectation that both could be
easily aligned to a particular and singular culture and language has long
eroded. One might continue that what was remarkable about transplanted
people forging monstrous or marvelous shared forms from disparate parts of
the globe is no longer so in a world where mixture is the norm and the rela-
tion of here and there is increasingly impossible coherently to disentangle.
Indeed in the academy, even though “culture” is often used in the place
vacated by nineteenth-century conceptions of race, it is often more accept-
able to avoid any and all generalizations about identity than it is to advance
a politics of racial purity.
Th ere are at least two answers to this objection.
First, it is almost axiomatic that the longing for what many postructur-
alist academics insist is discredited intensifi es particularly where it is en-
dangered. One witnesses this on both the political Right and Left in the
exponential blossoming of as many fundamentalisms in their religious and
secular permutations as more explicitly postmodern assemblages of dispa-
rate, fragmented political hopes and dreams. Many seek out pockets of the
globe that promise to remain premodern, continuing on with precolonial
ways of life that in their radical otherness represent the healthier alternatives
through which to set one’s back against the impending logic or seemingly
inexorable rhythm of our times. Shoring up such boundaries inevitably bor-
rows from the language of corruption and dilution, suggesting, in some
cases, that the mutually implicated nature of social life is its evil, in oth-
ers, more modestly, that all engagements with hegemonic developments
(whether linguistic or technological) are concessions, undermining a brand
of freedom modeled on the supposedly singular sovereignty of states or on
the view that one should be capable of absolutely determining that which
comes within one’s fold.
Second, to reiterate the argument with which we began, many diff erent
outcomes for symbolic life emerge when members of previously separated
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 179
groups collide. One possibility is creolization. In the processes that it de-
scribes are revealed the variegated workings of culture itself. However, it is
precisely because creolized products were ones that surprised and bothered
people—in conjoining distinct genealogies that were not supposed to con-
verge in one—that these other more widespread and universal mechanisms
were eff ectively illuminated. It is for this reason that a concept that derived
out of the geographically small Caribbean, the often disavowed birthplace
of global modernity, is of such broad usefulness. In other words, if what so
perturbed countless linguists was to hear such an African sounding French,
one that undeniably gestured toward a new Francophone trajectory, the ex-
amples of creolization that will be most striking today might be of another
form. But it will be the consternation that they provoke that singles them
out more than the larger process of continuity and rupture, conservatism
and transformation that are at the very core of the eff orts of human beings
to carve out distinct domains within an otherwise indiff erent world.
prescribing creolization
In addition to the descriptive social scientifi c accounts of creolization out-
lined in this book’s introduction, there are normative ones that, in some in-
stances, are clearly and unapologetically prescriptive. Th eir most compelling
spokesmen have also been some of the most signifi cant recent Caribbean
writers, including Martinican Édouard Glissant, Guyanese Wilson Har-
ris, and Martinican collaborators, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and
Raphaël Confi ant.
Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confi ant suggest in their manifesto, Éloge
de Créolité, that at the heart of Creoleness is a set of rules that specify a
particular orientation: “no culture is ever a fi nished product, but rather the
constant dynamic search for original questions, new possibilities, more in-
terested in relating than dominating, in exchanging rather than looting”
(1990, 903). In a defi ant, permanent openness, Créolité advances an account
of converging customs and traditions in which, through their rejection of
the strong multiculturalist or purist models, they can and will be mutually
enriching rather than confl ictually colliding, in forms, in Glissant’s account,
that become durable but not sedimented.
If the conditions that produced Créolité were neither voluntary nor at fi rst
refl ectively chosen, they did, in Wilson Harris’s account, richly “alter con-
ventional linearity and conventional frameworks” (1998, 23). For Édouard
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180 Th inking Th rough Creolization
Glissant, the Caribbean Sea after 1492 became “a place of passage, of tran-
sience rather than exclusion,” here invoking the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, “an archipelago-like reality, which does not imply the in-
tense entrenchment of a self-suffi cient thinking of identity, often sectarian,
but of relativity, the fabric of a great expanse, the relational complicity that
does not tend toward the One, but opens out onto diversity” (2008, 81).
Th e sheer degree of movement and economic displacement, in this (heavily
romanticized) portrait, nurtured a sensibility premised upon ongoing and
intense permeability, a view of uprooting as something other than a loss and
diversifi cation as diff erent from dilution (82).
Here Glissant emphasizes a point that we have already considered, that
creolization is “not a mechanical combination of components, characterized
by value percentages . . . [it] does not produce direct synthesis, but resul-
tants . . . something else, another way” (2008, 83). Alexis Nouss (2009) illu-
minates this theme when he argues that we need a distinctively social arith-
metic that rejects the commonplace practice of people trying to make their
relevant components add up to a sum of 100 percent, when talking about
themselves in racial, ethnic, and religious terms. Instead, he suggests, when
it comes to human beings, what is important and interesting about mixture
is precisely that we are 100 percent each of the groups to which we belong.
Finally, Glissant suggests that forging and manifesting creolized mixtures
or “the obligation to remake oneself every time” requires a unique capacity,
one of repeated and situational forgetting (2008, 86). Ulrich Fleischmann
has similarly contended that those “socialized in a creole way” of necessity
develop a range of psychological “strategies for presenting diff erent ‘selves’ ”
that is emphatic, diff erentiated, and capable of tolerating stress “without
collapsing into confl icting patterns of behaviour” (2003, xvii). In the re-
cent past, understandings of mixture as embodying in one corporeal entity
the tugging, competing demands of hostile communities—one can think
here of images of the tragic mulatta—were assumed to produce anomie
and mental disorder, frequently culminating in suicide. For members of
the creole literary movement, however, within the Caribbean are models of
quintessentially postmodern qualities indispensable for skillfully navigating
rather than being made desperate by a shared future in which transnational
movement is the norm.
Once denigrated, they allege, regional norms and practices predated
and embodied ideals after which French poststructuralism and its Anglo-
American varieties groped. Out of failures to confi ne antagonistic popula-
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 181
tions into neat and separated cultural, racial, and linguistic niches emerged
an insistently creative mode of personhood to be celebrated and exported.
Fleischmann writes, “Seen from the angle of globalization, the capacity to
construct and reconstruct ethnic and kinship ties that is one of the lega-
cies of slavery and labour migration becomes a highly modern asset. Th e
same switch turns the victims of colonization into forerunners of a new age”
(2003, xxxii). In this move, Caribbean “laboratories of disorder” (Glissant
2008, 89) positively anticipated both the character of global cities now and
the world of the future. If plantations have vanished, Glissant argues, cre-
olization marks Mexico City, Miami, Los Angeles, Caracas, Sao Paulo, New
Orleans, all megapolises “where the inferno of cement slums is merely an
extension of the inferno of the sugarcane or cotton fi elds” (86–87).
Much such writing, in other words, moves between painting a highly
evocative normative ideal after which we might strive and suggesting that it
has in fact already been rigorously realized in the Caribbean past, in models
that should be adopted and are already surfacing around the globe.
For some critics, however, this slippage has made these creative writers
mouthpieces of problematic eff orts to operationalize the creolizing spirit,
particularly in the political projects of the Caribbean independence-era. For
example, one might consider the Jamaican eff ort to forge “one out of many,”
or deliberately to craft a national identity that required emphasizing the
multiple origins of the common cultures that would guide and be embodied
in processes of nation-building (Bolland 2006, 2). In assuming that there
was no singular primordial nation to which the emergent state could refer,
they concluded that there was no original purity that would be endangered
by the public recognition of the pluralistic culture that had already grown
up there.
Particularly among anthropologists and sociologists, the record of the
forgings of national creole identities and cultures is wrought with severe
shortcomings. It has been suggested these projects imitated without invert-
ing aspects of colonial societies that they promised to displace and surpass
(Misir 2006). What became militant brands of cultural nationalism were
seen in fact to enshrine only one, particular form of hybridity, that of na-
tionalist leaders at the forefront of eff orts to oust white foreigners. Rather
than nurturing the social and political conditions for ongoing processes of
creolization, in other words, one ossifi ed instantiation was privileged to the
exclusion of others in ways that cultivated xenophobia toward people who
failed to exemplify such mixture, seeming to justify the continued unequal
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182 Th inking Th rough Creolization
distribution of societal rewards (Misir 2006, xxix). Hintzen argues that the
shift in racial discourse to the distinction between creole and noncreole
“serve[d] to hide commonalities in social practice that [could] form the basis
of counter-discursive challenges to power” (Hintzen 2006, 29). Th e newer
lines of division, which were obscured by calls to identify with the language
of being creole, remained color infl ected, not radically diff erent from earlier
periods in which to be “creole” was to be both distinct from nonlocal whites
and less mixed Africans (Alleyne 2003a, 41). Alleyne concludes that although
perhaps the whole world will eventually be creole, and that this may well be
desirable, in the meantime, in Jamaica and elsewhere, it is an expression of
a desire of both whites and blacks to be “Brown” (2003b, 471). One might
consider here Susan Buck-Morss’s (2009) challenge that while it is in mo-
ments of negation that subterranean universalizing identities emerge, for
instance, within anticolonial struggles in Haiti, as soon as one uses them
to construct and to build, they fail to be as broad as the societies to which
they should refer, reinscribing lines that produce cyclical confl icts between
victim and abuser.
Such criticisms of the exclusive nature of creole forms are heavily associ-
ated with East Indian Caribbean writers and those indigenous to the region.
Th e former, arriving after the foundational period of Caribbean planta-
tion societies, have insisted that they are outside of a fundamental African-
European spectrum within which processes of creolization transpire. Aisha
Khan (2006), for example, has argued that the concept of creolization re-
enforces precisely what it claims to dismantle, while Shalini Puri (2004)
insists that its radical potential has been exhausted because of its complicity
with the exclusion of East Indians from nationalist projects. Th is is a par-
ticular failing, observes Indo-Trinidadian writer Ramibai Espinet, since East
Indians comprise 20 percent of the region. Daniel Segal (1993) has suggested
that this is a product of particular perceptions of East Indians—if Africans
were framed as lacking culture and therefore raised up through mixture,
East Indians were seen as unmixable and Eastern, bearers or assimilators of
culture but not its creators, much like the role for many Asian-Americans
described by Ronald Takaki (1998) as “the permanent foreigner.” By con-
trast, if East Indians pose the question of whether one can enter too late
into processes of creolization, others suggest the opposite problem of having
been around too early on. Indeed, Vincente Diaz (2006) has emphasized
that part of the formulation of the identity creole is to mark what emerges,
newly indigenous, from the Caribbean New World, inserting other subju-
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 183
gated people in the place of indigenous or aboriginal ones usually through
the claim that such populations were either eliminated or survived in num-
bers too small to be mobilized.
One could suggest in response that what is here being challenged or re-
jected is not the process of creolization as much as the way in which its dis-
courses and practices were eff ectively monopolized and hijacked by a creole
elite that set themselves up as idealized hybrid exemplifi cations and gate-
keepers in order to interrupt the ongoing living processes of creolization
that would better refl ect the full range of the relevant societies. In so doing,
the focus of these criticisms are not unlike the national bourgeoisie that,
as I discussed in Chapter 4, remained locked in a xenophobic nationalism
rather than setting conditions to express and nurture a national conscious-
ness that would have had to be more radically redistributive. In these in-
stances, creolization is not completely unlike the heavily prescriptive ideal
of “color-blindness” which makes a normative project of not seeing the very
lines of diff erence crucial to diagnosing the historical and ongoing unequal
allocation of life opportunities. Th ere is no doubt that in these circum-
stances, the language of creolization is used to pursue highly conservative
ends, with the implication that there is nothing inherently progressive in
forms of mixture that emerge out of creolized processes.
With the aim of distinguishing among the implications of disparate
forms of creolization, Romberg and Vijay Prasad (2002) (under the name of
“polyculturalism”) have turned their gaze to instances of active resistance or
unwelcome eff orts to render more inclusive such clear eff orts at hegemony
consolidation. For Romberg, as mentioned earlier, in creolization one sees
a particular brand of strategic imitation in which objects of great symbolic
power of more dominating groups are recontextualized without permission
by the relatively disenfranchised against their initial purposes. In these cases,
antagonistic parties share a mutually comprehensible set of references for
such resistance to be intelligible as such. Still there is enough symbolic dis-
parity and ambiguity for particular elements to speak in multiple, opposed
valences and not to be understood entirely in the senses intended by those
authoring the resignifi cation.
Prasad similarly insists that polyculturalism, sharply contrasted with
multi culturalism, emerges precisely when separate marginalized groups fi ght
together against the terms of their unfreedom. Such eff orts, though it is not
their aim or purpose, produce practices, symbols, and language that bring
together those previously thought to belong to discrete groups and traditions
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184 Th inking Th rough Creolization
in ways that foster and sustain alliances that those hostile to their potential
fruits sought very deliberately to block. In other words, mutually compre-
hensible forms are created that build on and rework previous meanings to
articulate and give expression to what is newly underway. It is in this sense
that we described Fanon’s national consciousness as a methodically creolized
general will with implications that all contemporary eff orts to articulate that
which is consented to and right for all would have, of necessity, also to be
creolized. Th e vitality of the emergent symbolic forms are striking—rather
than funneling intellectual, creative, political, and moral energies into pre-
serving existing identities and what they dictate for behavior and aspira-
tions, polycultural processes pursue a world more befi tting the range of peo-
ple that occupy it, assuming that there are no complete, readymade existing
blueprints of how this must look. What materializes is unlikely perfectly to
mirror all of the various groups that might seek less constrained social and
political conditions, but eff orts in this direction introduce new repertoires
and examples that might in turn be reworked and recast. Crucially, the cre-
olizing of practices, languages, and ideas is not the object, in such examples,
but is the inevitable consequence of together diagnosing a shared world for
the sake of generating more legitimate alternatives.
In this sense, in defense of nationalist creolizing projects in Jamaica, we
might emphasize that while conservative in relation to the more profound
ideals of defi ning independence as bringing a substantive end to colonial
forms of life, what has emerged in their stead is certainly no better. Indeed,
the ascendant logic of neoliberalism, which encourages a branding of diff er-
ence framed as cultural as carefully protected sites of exclusion, leverage, and
potential enrichment in an increasingly scarce terrain, has not proven any
more eff ective at addressing racialized forms of radical inequality (Th omas
2004).
In other words, all eff orts at forming new hegemonies, even those imme-
diately linked to polycultural forms of struggle, will of course be faulty. In
these instances, however, what still singles out creolization for comment and
exploration is its disposition toward the nature of symbolic life: As a concept,
it is associated with creating that which is local. What is more, as O. Nigel
Bolland (2006) has emphasized, while creolization refers to national cul-
tures, what it suggests converge, in addition to key elements of language and
cosmology, are meanings linked to structural locations, to racial and class
identities—black, brown, and white or bourgeois and proletariat—that are
incoherent if isolated or delinked from their role in defi ning a spectrum
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 185
of opportunities or their denial. In other words, creolization insists on the
politicized nature of what is described in more euphemistic terms of “di-
versity.” In so doing, creolization off ers a useful antidote to the dangers of
exaggerating cultural distinctiveness to the point of mutual untranslatabil-
ity, a trend described and criticized by Kwasi Wiredu (1996) and Michelle
Moody-Adams (1997) who insist that while contexts of meaning are funda-
mentally shaped by historical contingencies, within these, one sees struggles
over power, authority, direction, and purpose in every human community.
Th e responses of Romberg and Prasad—that one fi nds living processes
of creolization among those who assume that the political future must be
constructed rather than simply continued or maintained—are essential to
considerations of how one might further creolize creolization or embrace an
ethos that does not set up some, specifi c hybrid identities to be championed
over a process that, like the work of politics, is never done.
Th is is not, however, to leave prescriptive brands of creolization without
necessary qualifi cation. To argue that every dimension of life must remain
rigorously open, unsedimented, and unfi nished may be a valuable ethos
in particular kinds of creative work—but they can only appear as such by
contrast with and in fact are reliant upon that which is not that way. How,
after all, might one gauge progress without any fi xed or prior referent? Seek-
ing novelty for its own sake is empty. It can, after all, be as much an index of
escapism as a palpable result of unique human forms of creativity.
While there is no doubt that the expectation that one maintain shared
customs and habits can feel imprisoning if they are turned to as purities
whose protection from corruption alone sustains a community—one might
think here of displaced communities who do try to make a territory or a
transplanted physical terrain out of prior forms of life—collectivities cannot
emerge without shared meanings that in addition to being forged constantly
and made anew must be old enough to become familiar and available, at key
moments, to invoke. Th us, if particular versions of “creole” identity are to be
criticized, it is not so much for their imperfection, which is inevitable, but for
attaching to an identity a name for an approach that has been interrupted by
those claiming and valorizing the newly achieved label. Th e response is not
to attack the inevitability of sedimentation but to urge for renewed eff orts
at better crystallizations, more universalizing ones. Even these will be mea-
sured, positively or negatively, in comparison with previous shortcomings.
In this sense, what is useful about Prasad’s formulation of polyculturalism is
that it emphasizes that practices and words more generally are signs whose
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186 Th inking Th rough Creolization
meanings are fi xed by convention but also porous and changeable; even
when relatively stable, they are open to various interpretations and saturated
by contentious relations of power. In this sense, while material conditions
of people’s lives, as Fanon so powerfully indicated, constrain systems of sig-
nifi cation, they can only appear to do so absolutely.
Much more common at present than the valorization of creolization are
projects of decreolization or those through which eff orts are made to purify
cultures of what are seen as external and contaminating prior or current in-
fl uences. Earlier examples of this phenomenon are eff orts to stave off the An-
glicizing of the French language or, in the Caribbean setting, Brinda Mehta’s
explorations of how, within Indo-Caribbean communities, creolization as
mixture with blackness produced an ambiguous tension: while seen as ex-
cluding Hindu experiences from eff orts to create indigenous local culture,
thereby marginalizing Indians as a group, embracing creolization off ered to
Indo-Caribbean women an enabling alternative to patriarchal gender roles
defended and imposed in the name of cultural integrity. She cites Patricia
Mohammed (1988), who argues that when speaking of Indian women in
Trinidad, creolization was an insulting way to describe Indian women who
consorted with African men (Mehta 2004, 121). In both such instances,
one witnesses clear, if negative, admissions that mixture is underway and
eff orts to rewind and stave off further such developments.
Th ere are certainly moments in which creolization is avoided because it
seems only to amount to embracing assimilation into a colonizing culture.
Th is is precisely what we considered in the example of the previous chap-
ter of occupied Algeria and it is a position advanced by several leading US
Afrocentrists: for them, to be creolized in this country is to be polluted by
Eurocentrism. Th e diffi culty with this position, however, is that new world
African cultures, even in their most strongly black nationalist varieties, are
already inescapably creolized—frequently communicated in English or Por-
tuguese or Dutch or French and of necessity already in conversation with
the full range of modern thinkers, not only those of African descent. One
might retort accurately that we are all of African descent. At that point,
however, it is no longer clear what Eurocentrism would mean. Th ere are
similar decreolizing pressures placed on most Native American communi-
ties: asked to exemplify an unadulterated purity; to be a window into a lost
and uncorrupted world; to off er a refuge or “otherwhere” from the imperial
logics of the present. At the same time, indigenous communities in settler
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 187
societies of the Atlantic and the Pacifi c are the most racially mixed of any
living communities.
One might pause here in light of these arguments to consider the very
diff erent reactions of the French government to the Négritude writings of
Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, on the one hand, and Fanon’s A Dying
Colonialism, on the other. Négritude, in many ways, is much more compatible
with a multicultural than a creolizing model. In it, each community’s “culture”
is a territory with fortressed boundaries, in the case of the colonized, a sanctu-
ary into which one retreats, even if in petrifi ed and zombifi ed form, having
conceded at least temporarily that the public terrain of politics is that of the
settler. By contrast, Fanon captures how disturbed were those who suddenly
heard their French, the language that the colonized supposedly could not learn,
being used by North Africans to converse animatedly to one another about the
progress of their anticolonial eff orts. Suddenly a creolized lingua franca (that
combined the French lexifi er with the full range of North African substrates),
a framework introduced to colonize was used to interrupt and throw off its
forms. And indeed, in terms of the fate of books advancing these respective
visions: it was Fanon’s that was banned six months after it came to print.
Before proceeding, we must reiterate two key ironies at the core of a
meaningful formulation of the concept of creolization: Th e fi rst is that
processes of creolization while fi rst developed to explore Caribbean pecu-
liarities are underway beyond it. At the same time, these approaches to dif-
ference have historically been noticed most precisely when inspiring dread
or bemusement for combining previously distinctive genealogies. In these
instances of mergings provoking misgivings, those who understood them-
selves through terms of distance and separation encountered evidence of
their mutual constitution near impossible to ignore. It is this disturbing
aspect that in fact drew attention to phenomena that while widespread,
perhaps even universal, could otherwise go unnoticed. In appearing where
they were not supposed to, creolized forms exemplifi ed and thereby pointed
to key features of how human worlds are often forged.
Second, the most vital instances of creolization emerge when they are not
the aim; when instead groups located diff erently together try to forge more
viable collectivities that necessitate contesting existing symbols in ways that
produce newer ones. In other words, creolization is progressive not when we
are deliberately rejecting being straightjacketed by any and all existing prac-
tices or when we seek novelty as proof of our capacity to create, but when
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188 Th inking Th rough Creolization
we are not constrained by the misleading commitments that would frame
a resulting creolized form as a problematic betrayal or that would make us
prematurely foreclose that in which we could or would partake so that we
would be unable meaningfully to bridge former divides.
Finally, we do not in creolizing political theory want to seek out in the
theorists we engage a smattering of worldly cultural diff erence in a patron-
izing politics of inclusion. We do want to capture what is unfolding around
us to off er models of more legitimate, irretrievably global, political futures.
Th e results, if rigorously pursued, will inevitably be creolized.
further creolizing creolization
Several anthropologists have expressed reservations about the adequacy of
generalizing the concept of creolization, of borrowing a term born of spe-
cifi c historical geopolitical predicaments to describe the erosion of discretely
distributed cultural diff erence in a wide range of domains. For Mimi Sheller
(2003), for instance, this can only mean to gut and overextend the idea
in an act she likens to piracy. For others, such as Ulf Hannerz, tensions
between links to particular regions and generalized notions remain with
all theorizing, no less evident with terms like mafi a and apartheid or, we
could add, democratization and legitimization, than with creolization. We
can, Hannerz urges, think internationally and constructively while remain-
ing aware of subtleties of context that may be lost in translation (2006, 585).
Carl Schmitt observed this point some time ago, that when we engage in
theoretical refl ection we take specifi c ideas rooted in a particular position in
a distinct, contentious struggle and use them to make sense of other situ-
ations both similar and diff erent, mobilizing and extending while altering
their symbolic content. Th is seems yet more permissible in this case. After
all, creolization did aim to describe the process of making forms of life local
through their critical resituation. Khan therefore reminds would-be crit-
ics of the expansion of the concept that the foundational moments out of
which it emerged are themselves highly stylized, even in the hands of the
most rigorous of historians. Seeking to “encompass as many contingencies
and particularities as possible . . . its purported empiricism is in theory
only” (588). Finally, if creolization described a set of processes tied funda-
mentally to the emergence and spread of mercantile capitalism, it should
be reengaged to illuminate the reconfi guration of relational spheres of the
global and local, the national and diasporic in the most contemporary in-
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 189
stantiations of global capitalism (Crichlow and Northover 2009, 181 and 213;
Cohen and Toninato 2010, 7).
While there are dangers of making the meaning of creolization too loose
to be useful—if describing everything, it uniquely magnifi es nothing—there
is an odd irony in aiming to “purify” and fi x its meaning in a sequestered
particularity. More useful is to distinguish it from alternatives including, as
Eriksen has suggested, from the cultural pluralism of multiculturalism and
from hybridity, which consists in the mediating role contractually created
for exceptional people and groups who help to reassert the logic of pure, dis-
tinct groups by serving as their go-between. Th is is urgent when we turn
explicitly to questions of method because, without explicit self-refl ection,
the ways in which we conceptualize the meaning of culture and symbolic
life decisively overdetermine how we envisage the disciplines from and within
which we think. What do I mean?
A common response, for instance, to the signifi cant challenges posed by
heterogeneity to earlier aspirations to formulate universal theories has been
to call for interdisciplinary or mixed-method research. Th ese, at the level of
method, mimic the politics and mode of multiculturalism: distinct disci-
plinary approaches, each with unique genealogies of commitment are ag-
gregated in the hope that together the discrete pieces amount to a complete
picture that, if not comprehensive, is at least less partial. Each party to such
endeavors is understood to contribute most if they authentically represent
each of their respective traditions. As I have said of forms of cultural mixture
later described as instances of creolization, those skeptical about interdisci-
plinary initiatives frequently see ensuing intellectual mixtures only in terms
of dilution or corruption. Th ey appear illicit. Preferable in times framed
as those of scarcity such as our own is to develop the most specialized of
masteries, shoring up the necessity of this particular area of study and the
indispensability of these specifi c practitioners.
Creolization, by contrast, would assume, following the accounts that I
have considered, that disciplines are the culmination of particular genealo-
gies taken up to make sense of particular problems and current circum-
stances. Th ese will render specifi c elements of these fairly sedimented prac-
tices especially relevant as others clearly become less so. One is likely to fi nd,
as well, that dimensions of other disciplinary formations, those not typically
employed, off er categories, foundational analogies, forms of argument, evi-
dence, and ideas that are highly illuminating. However, one will not turn
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190 Th inking Th rough Creolization
to these for the sake of being ecumenical or exemplifying tolerance or in-
clusivity but instead because they off er magnifying routes into and through
a dilemma that one otherwise would lack. In enlisting them, one can move
forward. In such acts of appropriation and incorporation, the purposes to
which these disciplinary approaches were originally put might be obscured
or, as they are recontextualized, might be brought into focus through a now
distinctive use. One does not simply aggregate or add up these respective
methods—with the implication that one might say that the work is 10 per-
cent economic and 65 percent sociological, and so on.
Some of the most signifi cant examples of previous creolized method-
ological endeavors are political economy and genetics, both of which could
only materialize if their relevant practitioners abandoned primary concerns
with authentically enacting what it already meant to be a member of their
given fi eld. In seeking to unlock particular puzzles, they instead came upon
what Buck-Morss has described as the edges and gaps among all disciplinary
formations, using their own creative abilities to negotiate among distinctive
modes of reasoning and argumentation.
In this sense, we might recall Mufwene’s earlier observation that creole
tongues are not radical exceptions, but instead prototypes that magnify in
rapidity and radicality processes at work in all language development. In
particular, remember that he observed: outside of scholastic systems, one’s
aim is neither to create nor master a complete language but instead to use it
to meet communicative needs. Even then, it is less the needs of converging
communities that drive change than the collective outcomes of the nego-
tiation and innovation of individual encounters. Restructuring is often the
result of the codifi cation of imperfect replications or of errors. Still, if creole
languages are distinguished by higher rates of this last feature, this is a diff er-
ence of degree from what goes on within monolingual communities.
One might say the same of disciplines and transdisciplinary work more
generally. Th eir developmental processes are not radically diff erent; the for-
mer simply reifi es aims that are secondary in the latter. Disciplines them-
selves, in other words, are signifi cantly altered and refashioned over time.
Still, there is much commitment among most practitioners in ensuring their
continuity and survival. With transdisciplinary work, by contrast, the world
we are trying to understand is centrally assumed to exceed the incomplete
grasp of any and each discrete fi eld. While their varied approaches are surely
useful, none is framed as capable of being complete in an abstract or absolute
sense. Th erefore rather than prioritizing trying to master the whole of any
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 191
singular discipline, transdisciplinary endeavors treat such a goal as unachiev-
able and emphasize that what is considered worthy of such an authoritative
grasp is always highly contextual. What leads to scholarly innovation is not
disciplines acting in relationship to one another but individual intellectuals
encountering one another in constructive debate. What leads to such acts
of restructuring is both imperfect replication—the altering of existing argu-
ments through mistakes or alterations and through their combination with
ideas from elsewhere.
Within political theory, the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (for instance,
1938, 1962, 1969, 1996, 1999, 2000a) and Frantz Fanon off er groundbreaking
examples of creolizing work. Seamlessly drawing from history, philosophy,
sociology, psychology, political economy, and literature to diagnose the cen-
trality of racialization to projects of European modernity. Rather than seeking
to authenticate themselves through the mastery of hyper-specialization, to
emulate the fi elds in which they were credentialed, they sought syntheses that
deliberately avoided replicating the particular areas of illumination and blind-
ness of each respective disciplinary approach. Guided by the larger aim of
disalienating the people whom they studied, they improvised how it was that
vantages disclosed by one approach would relate to and be transformed in
conversation with others. Ironically, in such creolized work, one sees again the
uniqueness of sociological approaches and psychoanalytical ones, the specifi c-
ity of literary insights and those of political economy. Th rough resisting their
respective isolation, the distinctiveness of each comes newly into view.
Put simply, in interdisciplinary work that conceives of disciplines as advo-
cates of multiculturalism view culture, the guiding ethos is one of tolerance
and of honoring diversity. Cultures and fi elds are approached as if they were
somewhat self-determining nations requiring separation to preserve their
authenticity. Th is is crucial since it is through their distinctiveness secured
by distance that they can enrich the larger community. In processes of cre-
olization, by contrast, a given aim or project supervenes over principles that
would in advance restrict what constitute available resources and reactions
by fi xing a prior rules of engagement. In seeking to create viable forms out
of what is locally available, with creolization one assumes that each, while
retaining some of its original character, will, in being resituated, also be
transformed as it combines to become something continuous and distinc-
tive. Unlike multiculturalism, the advocates of which typically assume that a
more accommodating political liberalism is the singular adequate model for
the political present and future, creolization emerged where shared, existing
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192 Th inking Th rough Creolization
terms for social cooperation were absent. Th ese circumstances therefore
threw into sharp relief the politically determined, relational, and malleable
nature of the worlds of meaning to which culture refers.
In arguing for the usefulness of its generalization, I am not aiming radi-
cally to separate creolization from its origins. Indeed, part of what makes
creolization particularly useful is its historical and continued connection to
the Caribbean and through it to the Global South. Th is is for at least two
primary reasons.
First, the legacy of epistemic colonization is ongoing. Th rough it an inter-
national division of labor constitutes relations between center and periph-
ery, affi rming that ideas, directions, and purposes concerning the organizing
of political life and the highest forms of theoretical refl ection emerge from
the metropole and are at best imperfectly applied in the now independent
former colonies. Th e implications are that while those in Euro-America can
be considered literate professionals without following the most recent intel-
lectual developments in other parts of the globe, the same is not true in
reverse. Intellectual agenda setting continues to take place in a small set of
institutions that cannot be ignored with impunity if one hopes to be able to
teach and publish in reputable institutions. Still, while for some this means
the simple adoption and aping of work from there, for many thinkers out-
side of these centers (even if physically located within them), it is in the
contradictions laid bare in confrontations with such double standards that
constructive thought emerges. We might recall here Fanon’s critical engage-
ments with Adler or with Freud, with Hegel or with Sartre.
In other words, the project of creolizing theory or of engaging resources
that are local and from elsewhere to grapple with domestic challenges of
collective life without doubt that such eff orts constitute contributions to
the world of thought is underway among communities in the Global South.
Th is is perhaps most evident in those who address the challenge stated clearly
in Paget Henry’s pathbreaking Caliban’s Reason, of aiming in the domain
of philosophy and refl ection to emulate the creolization that characterizes
Caribbean music, food, literature, and language, rather than allowing for
the presumed authority of Europe to continue. At times, this has involved,
as Henry demonstrates (and Gerald Larson [1988] and Leigh Jenco [2007]
have argued in the context of northeast Asia), looking at spheres of life that
contingent historical developments made primary sites of past philosophi-
cal refl ection (rather than assuming that we know in advance where these
should be located) and at others abandoning the quintessentially imperial
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 193
view that all that is ultimately worth knowing will emanate out of the bel-
lies of empires. In other words, those in the Global North would do well
to emulate their Southern counterparts who do not assume that all that
they should critically consider will eventually arrive at their door in their
deliberate eff orts to assure that their scholarship can accurately be called
“worldly.”
Second, one of the clearest indexes of power is the ability to set the terms
of inclusion and exclusion. In radically unequal societies in which benefi ts
are highly concentrated in small communities, the terms of exclusivity are
likely to be many. In other words, one might fail to exemplify many diff er-
ent required attributes for membership. In direct proportion and opposite
to this are communities of more limited means that become the highly var-
iegated domain of the vast majority who are excluded. In such a predica-
ment, it is overdetermined that creolization is more likely to emerge where
the terms of entry, while inevitably exercising a cetrifugal force (as with
French lexifi ers in the production of Francophone creoles), are less easily
controlled. As my discussion of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks revealed,
absent eff orts to forge an alternative, what goes on among the marginalized
is often a monstrous mirroring of the powerful. In this sense, while it is not
intrinsically so, there does seem to be a very likely relationship between cre-
olization and projects aimed at addressing the nature of such exclusions.
But if creolization has been used primarily retrospectively and adjecti-
vally, to look backward, even in stylized ways, at various life worlds, can one
properly use it, not as a measure of gatekeeping, but as a verb and method-
ological orientation toward the political future? As the proceeding discus-
sion no doubt suggests, my answer is an adamant and enthusiastic “yes.”
Th e present is described over and over as a globalized or globalizing mo-
ment or one in which relations between the here and the there, the local
and the worldly are being reconfi gured in ways we are still trying both to
fathom and direct. While our predicament is more diff use than the indi-
vidual encounters that brought Europe, Africa, and the Americas together
in the Caribbean of the fi fteenth century—making it very diffi cult for them
to understand themselves outside of their entangled interrelations—we too
cannot avoid reinterpreting ourselves through worlds previously foreign.
In such a context, there will inevitably be a variety of responses. In addi-
tion to the interdisciplinary one against which I am advancing creolization,
it is also possible for fi elds to be absorbed into one another, to be eradi-
cated, or to be decreolized. Th is third possibility currently abounds. It is
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194 Th inking Th rough Creolization
one through which scholars once conversant in an overlapping and shared
disciplinary language move away from the conditions of cross-fertilization
and mutual constitution in increasingly isolated subfi eld niches that nurture
separate trajectories that in one version of “autonomy” or “independence” in
fact become less and less intelligible to one another.
Th e diffi culty with this, of course, is that an intellectual division of labor
is given its coherence if it ultimately serves a higher unity in which each
respective community magnifi es pieces of the larger puzzle of reality. In po-
litical science, for instance, the questions and problems illuminated by theo-
rists, after all, are supposed to work in tandem with phenomena clarifi ed by
qualitative and quantitative work undertaken in American, Comparative,
or International politics so that students working among these distinct areas
come away with a grasp of how they might navigate a much larger whole.
However, if rigor and sophistication in each subfi eld are premised on
a narrowing purity through which good work is that which is understood
by an ever smaller academic community in which one can only meaning-
fully participate through devoting oneself entirely to mastering its discrete
basolect language, the larger synthetic work that focused scholarship is ul-
timately to serve is obscured. In such circumstances, rather than off ering
unique concepts generated by grappling with enduring particular problems
to facilitate broader comprehension, specialized academic tongues func-
tion primarily as gatekeeping devices, means of artifi cially narrowing the
pool of who might enter a domain increasingly defi ned by extraintellectual,
frequently economic dictates. As Terrence Ball has argued, communities,
including those of inquiry, only exist so long as their members continue to
converse in civilized ways—not through an attitude of “live and let live” but
through talking and listening that require prioritizing translating among
idioms in ways that invite critical exchange over point-scoring that instead
breeds niche isolationism and protectionism (1987, 4).
After all, a discipline like political science has historically been very cre-
olized: one might think here of classic works in the fi eld, including those
by Th eda Skocpol, Robert Dahl, and Hannah Arendt. In each case, one
would be accurate to call the given writings works in history or theory or
politics—ones from which many audiences beyond those of card-carrying
professional political scientists might learn.
It should come as no surprise that in circumstances like our own there
is less and less conversation and movement between the scholarly fi eld of
political science and the world of politics and that but for the small set of
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 195
students seeking preparation for graduate school, fewer who want simply to
equip themselves to be engaged citizens fi nd resources in the way that the
fi eld is presented in undergraduate courses. Often students instead leave the
major with feelings of greater alienation and impotence—with a sense that
the distance between the world and their grasp of it has only grown.
Should we not be disturbed by such decreolizing trajectories, ones that
move in a reductio ad absurdum toward a situation in which we cannot be
understood by any but ourselves? Is it not the aim, after all, of scholarly
work to enlarge the world of human beings through expanding our capac-
ity to communicate that which we do comprehend? Surely, it is not a real
strength or actual sign of autonomy if political theorists can speak only to
one another—making references to a small set of incredibly rich texts in
ever more impenetrable and arcane language. What is more, decreolization
does not only involve moving our disciplines further and further away from
adequately describing the reality we are to illuminate, it is also costly in ways
that are unsustainable. We no longer occupy (indeed few ever did) political
and economic conditions in which disciplines can proceed on a model in
which one works away in one’s narrow corner oblivious to the others.
Here again, the contrast with the Caribbean is striking. Th ere and in its
various diaspora, the Renaissance man and woman is the norm: literature
professors write novels and read physics, often at a very high level of sophis-
tication in each case. Th ey assume that they will have to fi ll multiple roles,
that there are not resources to emulate the Anglo-American university and
therefore that more hinges on individual and collective creativity, on articu-
lating the relation among the parts. One might say that the US academy is
graced by this eased relationship to individual breadth—that we can each
do less better—however, in so doing, it is not clear that we do not lose sight
of the meaning of the unique resources that we, as intellectuals and scholars,
are to use and expand.
At present, the response to the neoliberal university clearly must be to
reject the model of disciplines as off ering discrete bundles of specialized
knowledge—instead rearticulating the world to which the separate pieces
refer, how they comprise a meaningful whole that can embolden genera-
tions of young people to participate in forging the shape of that which they
are entering. We would do better, if this is our concern, not to see our work
as stronger because it can only be understood by a tiny handful of similarly
trained professionals also fl uent in our respective basolects, but if it can take
what is most valuable in this information and use it to illuminate shared
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196 Th inking Th rough Creolization
dilemmas in ways that enable us to reenliven mesolects through which we
might articulate how to proceed.
Creolization off ers a model of how it is that people have constructed col-
lective worlds out of necessity. It is not through tiny unassociated parts co-
existing in mutual hostility but by recognizing, exploring, and enunciating
complex interdependencies in ways that transcode and incorporate so that
each is understood in and through the terms of each other—so that the con-
ditions of mutual intelligibility and sociality can emerge. In this sense, a cre-
olized method for political theory is one that aims in its guiding assumption
to treat symbolic worlds, “culture,” as Sigmund Freud (1961) argued in Civi-
lization and Its Discontents, as the eff orts of human beings to forge domains
within an otherwise indiff erent or inhospitable natural world. In carving out
such spheres we seek refl ections of our values and of ourselves.
One could similarly say that politics and theory devoted to refl ection
about it are centuries-long endeavors to fashion a province guided by a set
of rules and shared practices distinctive from those of the market and of
war that set conditions in and through which individuals together, through
participation, can potentially seek conditions for their collective thriving. In
the audacious imagination of Rousseau, through such endeavor, we become
something other than what we are when merely duplicated and multiplied as
discrete individuals, an indivisible part of the qualitatively diff erent category
of political generality, citizenry, or sovereign people. As with creolization, in
this formulation, our distinctiveness as individuals becomes apparent pre-
cisely in and through our combination with others into something continu-
ous and new. Rather than lost in a totality, generalities alone magnify the
distinctiveness of their component parts.
Anne Norton (2004a) has described the fetishism of method that is over-
taking the study of the politics in the United States as an expression of a
desire of scholars to transcend our own fallibility, to fi nd, once and for all, “a
tool that does not turn in the hand” (135). Likening the promises of method
to those of liturgy and sacrament, it is, in her words, “ritual for a secular
priesthood—if you adhere to the ritual . . . grace will come” (134). Still,
she warns, no ritual always works and sacraments only bring grace to those
already graced. Th e implication of course is that the hope “for a method
that cannot be used irresponsibly is illusory” (135). Far more likely to prove
illuminating would be to recall the ways in which eff orts to divest concepts
of their ambiguity distances them from practice, that hunting for variables
that are treated with abstract, conceptual integrity and autonomy occludes
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 197
the multidirectional reciprocities and imbrications of variables with one an-
other (7). Th ere is a greater chance that we will reduce the kinds of fallibility
linked to an absence of self-awareness if we take seriously, as Fanon warned,
that all methods are allied with particular regimes of truth and the ratio-
nalities in which they consist (82), integral to larger deeply political projects
about the nature of desirable futures.
Th e desperation to transcend the recurring appearances of our own inevi-
table responsibilities, we might add, were considered by Karl Jaspers among
others to be a defi ning feature of intellectual life in the modern age. Aware,
he wrote, “that the image of a whole can be nothing more than one aspect
contemplated as an object, and cannot be a knowledge of the real whole . . .
the dangers and hazards of genuine activity in the world should be accepted”
(1957, 165–66). Th e curtain over reality, he announced, had been lifted.
Writers and scholars considered and attempted to comprehend the world,
but every eff ort was overshadowed by doubts of the validity of every deter-
mination. Behind every interpretation of the unity of life there loomed the
distinction between the world and the world as we know it.
Creolization is borne of just this doubled moment: of loss and melan-
choly and simultaneously of possibilities, even necessities for self-creation,
of fashioning what is supposed to have been eff ective because primordial.
Th ere is a desire to posit disciplines as if they too are of timeless ancestry, as
if they have always existed rather than being the ambiguous and open-ended
products of human endeavor.
Creolizing political theory therefore does mean avoiding treating worlds
of meaning as if they are already completely constituted, fi nished, and closed
and instead writing as if we too are part of their construction and therefore
broaden or foreclose, empower or silence many diverse and unequal copar-
ticipants living and dead. It means being as committed to the projects with
which political theory has been associated as realizing that a vibrant future
may require cross-breeding and intermixture that is not bastardization but
the charting of a new moment in its genealogy, one in which its terms might
be reenlivened particularly because they are not jettisoned but resituated so
they are continuous and made new.
concluding implications
To creolize political theory then is to grapple with heterogeneity and mix-
ture not as discrete pockets of a fractured world but as coconstituting and
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198 Th inking Th rough Creolization
cosituating each other in ways that we are obligated to try to understand
and refl ect in writing that is, after all, aimed to illuminate precisely this
sphere. In so doing, one not only pushes against the genre of political the-
ory writing in ways for which Anne Norton and George Shulman (2008),
within political theory, have long argued. One also cannot but grapple with
how to think among such registers, fostering conversations that do not
all partake of the same argumentative modes and conventions. Finally, we
aim to make our epistemological limitations, which are unavoidable, sites
of openness to unknown horizons so that we can restore human beings as
value-giving subjects with meaning-making capacities that are never just
those of reproduction, which in turn requires engagement with the plural-
ity of intellectual heritages that constitute the symbolic world (Cornell and
Panfi lio 2010). Th is is crucially also to reject being overtaken by poststruc-
tural suspicions of any collective aspirations as necessarily totalizing and
repressive.
Th e social scientifi c literatures concerning creolization that I have dis-
cussed thus far document this process under much more constrained con-
ditions than those faced by the scholar or intellectual. Scholars and intel-
lectuals do not, in other words, write on the plantation with the project of
developing a functional, mutually intelligible language. When faced with a
pressing problem, we may make use of whatever we may obtain with limita-
tions that are primarily our own.
In this sense, the creolized methods I am arguing for do have much in
common with what have been called “problem-driven theory” in the writ-
ings of Ian Shapiro (2007). Where I depart from Shapiro, however, is his
assumption that such an approach is necessarily synonymous with prag-
matism, a highly culturally specifi c, in some cases US-nationalist, way into
such work. Doing so assumes in advance that one particular constellation
of disciplinary commitments and orientations is suffi cient and exhaustive
rather than making a question of what, in this particular instance, promises
to be most illuminating. For instance, if one were, as I am, concerned with
the exponential growth of enslavement worldwide, why would pragmatism
be the most obvious resource? Th e only sense in which this might be true
would be if we agreed to defi ne any approach in which one suspends prior
methodological commitments so that the problem at hand determines that
toward which one would turn only as pragmatism, rather than as the many
other approaches, including, say phenomenology, that have also defi ned
themselves through this foundational orientation.
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 199
It is with this in mind that I suggested in the introduction that the cre-
olization of theory might be compared with Rousseau’s general will rather
than, as is the case with multidisciplinary work, to a will of all. When cul-
ture is described in the Geertzian or strong multicultural mold, it suggests a
world of worlds, each distinct and not overlapping, rather than worlds that
necessarily already make sense of themselves in relation to one another. For
all of their many dimensions and divergent temporalities, their relations are
marked by staunch divisions, inequalities, and contention. But to frame
these on the model of divergent private interests promises to erode the very
possibility of discussion of what it is that can sustain a global human com-
munity. Recall that Rousseau’s general will aims to unite what is popular and
right in a way that secures and extends the conditions for a polity to have
a sense of itself as a social unit rather than a mere aggregate of separated
individuals. As such the “we” that it articulates and expresses rather than
siphoning off distinct groups makes sense of each in relation to the other.
I have been asked why one would bother to argue for an approach to
political theory that so breaks with many established academic norms? Why
not simply undertake such work beyond the confi nes of the academy, where
one does not face disciplining disciplines?
However troubled the contemporary academy may be, it remains the
set of institutions that represent and off er to every generation what is sup-
posed to be the most rigorous grasp of reality developed by those who have
made this their vocation. Even if some of the most vital intellectual endeav-
ors have been and will always be undertaken outside of these frameworks,
within them we teach and write with what Lewis Gordon and I have called
a “pedagogical imperative” (2006) or, in what will pain postmodern read-
ers, with a concern to honor the trust that students place in us to portray
the most accurate account of truths available. If occupying the world as a
scholar is to be aware of the enormity of what one does not know, in profes-
sional terms it is to try to stay apace with developments and debates at the
center of one’s chosen fi elds not only as defi ned by a small set of others but
by a larger, contradictory, and refracted world.
In closing, as I suggested earlier, I do not want to imply that creoliza-
tion as a method is without limitations. Th e fi rst of these, as the previous
discussion should have made clear, is that processes of creolization are borne
of and expressions of loss, of contexts defi ned by signifi cant interruptions
in which long continuities are broken and people work with what remains
to fashion a viable alternative. Th e focus on a creolizing method, therefore,
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200 Th inking Th rough Creolization
turns our attention away from a focus on developing the greatest possible
mastery of particular existing disciplinary formations to selecting what of
them is most of use. Even then, not everything combines in a lasting way.
In other words, if one’s approach to culture and to fi elds of study is to try as
comprehensively as possible to keep elements that one encountered in one’s
fi rst introduction to them intact through as close to perfect duplication as
possible, creolization will not be desirable. Of course, such an eff ort en-
counters the challenge posed to all forms of conservatism: to keep anything
meaningfully the same requires that it be transformed as it is resituated
again and again for each new circumstance.
Still, many might have reservations regarding the radically present- and
future-oriented constructive ethos of creolization—that it might lack the
self-refl exivity and humility necessary to avoid a crude instrumentalism, that
even as we encounter other symbolic forms we might be so over determined
by familiar frameworks that we will fail to be challenged by that within
them which is distinctive. Th is can be a genuine danger and is not one that
is easily addressed. I would suggest, however, that when particular symbolic
forms are constantly and deliberately juxtaposed with historically contin-
gent alternatives, their specifi city is most apparent. If able to parade in the
singular, one particular confi guration of forms can become enveloping, ap-
pearing to have no outside.
Finally, processes of creolization cannot themselves determine the condi-
tions within which they take place—the particular ingredients that will be
available and whether their incorporation or rejection will appear as political
accommodation or its opposite. Instead, as the epigraph from Mary Shelley
in the next chapter suggests, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does
not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in
the fi rst place, be aff orded . . . Invention consists in the capacity of seizing
on the capacities of a subject and in the power of molding and fashioning
ideas suggested to it.”
Creolizing political theory, in conclusion then, involves, in the language
of Lewis Gordon (2006, 14), an act of teleological suspension through which
we recall a larger telos, in this instance, a galvanizing concern with under-
standing and protecting a distinct domain called political life. Rather than
treating our discipline as if it were never born and can never die by ontolo-
gizing it (or treating it as isomorphic with Being itself ), we must recenter
diffi cult questions over the methods that would determine in advance what
can and cannot be asked and assume that we will devise viable models,
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Th inking Th rough Creolization 201
however in need of subsequent alteration they will be, that put our capaci-
ties for reason in the service of the unfi nished work of liberation. In so
doing, ironically, we emulate those who have served through time as some
of our greatest guides, none of whom devoted their lives exclusively to the
academy nor addressed their works solely to a small community of other
scholars. Th eir language and ideas necessarily drew on whichever resources
lay at hand, some of which, without doubt, in their mistranslation, were
wonderfully innovative.
In the political terrain, few are surprised by reminders that what come to
feel like the most natural of alliances are contingent and forged, contingent
and forged again—made to frame as shared, concerns that are disparate and
at times even fundamentally confl icting. However, if the aim of political
life is to seek goods as broad as societies themselves, not to make a priori
exclusions of who can be ignored with impunity, it will require recentering
precisely those on the margins that have been treated as dispensable. Th ere
cannot, in other words, be anything remotely approximating a public good
that is not creolized through and through.
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203
Conclusion
Everything must have a beginning . . . and that beginning must be linked to something
that went before. Th e Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the
elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in
creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the fi rst place, be aff orded:
it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance
itself . . . Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capacities of a subject and in
the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.
—mary wollstonecraft shelley
I have off ered readings of Rousseau and Fanon in the preceding pages in
the hope of demonstrating the productivity of bringing ideas together in a
creolized rather than comparative way.
Readers may well then wonder what they are to make of the relationship
of the creolizing that I am arguing for to the now blossoming subfi eld of
comparative political theory. After all, one striking feature of the work that I
call “creolizing” is its bringing into constructive conversation fi gures whose
universal signifi cance is undisputed with those that, at least historically in
North America and Western Europe, have been considered only salient
within narrowed parameters, or worse, not properly theoretical.
One could conclude with some accuracy that within the US academy no
new development has created more disciplinary space for the project of cre-
olizing political theory than comparative political theorizing. Informed fun-
damentally by heremeneutics and postcolonial thought, comparative politi-
cal theory, from the outset, has aimed to expand what is designated thought
to ensure that “ ‘political theory’ is about human and not merely Western
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204 Conclusion
dilemmas . . . [making] room for the possibility that there is humanly sig-
nifi cant knowledge outside the confi nes of the Western canon” (Euben 1999,
9–10). For Fred Dallmayr (2004), echoing the challenge of Leo Strauss some
decades before, especially in the aftermath of September 11, political theo-
rists fi ddled as Rome burned. In the face of grand and pressing problems
requiring bold imagination, we theorists had, in sizeable numbers, retreated
into rehearsing canons—seeking to be enveloped in the worlds of classical
texts rather than using them to respond to our own. Dallmayr therefore
beckoned to theorists to retrieve a more coherently distinctive role for our-
selves at the forefront of developing languages and idioms for an increas-
ingly global civil society. Regularizing such confrontations with diff erence,
he contended, promised to unsettle and repoliticize the creedal quality of
core ideas in Western political theory canon.
What is more, from its very beginning, comparative political theory has
been marked by an unusual degree of methodological self-refl exivity rooted
in an awareness of the instructive and prohibitive lessons of both theoreti-
cal and empirical forays into comparisons with non-Western worlds. Dall-
mayr, for example, warned fi rst against “imperialist modes of theorizing,”
in which one portion of the globe would monopolize the production of
shared meanings and practices that should “only arise from lateral inter-
action, negotiation, and contestation among diff erent, historically grown
cultural frameworks” (2004, 29). In addition, he advanced, worldly theory
would emerge out of a middle course between the methods of abstract gen-
eralists and of narrow specialists, neither through seeking “indiscriminate
‘assimilation’ ” nor radically untranslatable otherness (1999, 3). With Euben,
comparative endeavors constituted a “reclamation” of the foundations of
political theory. After all, at the time of Herodotus, she observes, a theo-
rist was “a public emissary dispatched by his city to attend the religious
festivals of other Greek cities” (1999, 10–11). (One might reconsider here
the opening lines of Th e Republic, when Plato explains that he is en route
to a festival being held in Piraeus for the fi rst time. Th is encounter pref-
aces the entire work of alternative political imagining that follows.) Ad-
ditionally, as evident in the instances of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Baron de
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, and Alexis de Tocqueville, theory
transpires out of journeying to alien political worlds that stir a critical sense
of the peculiarity of one’s own institutions, challenging their seeming inevi-
tability by nurturing self-understanding that grounds an enlivened sense of
possibility.
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Conclusion 205
In addition, Euben stresses that comparative political theory cannot rely
upon and should endeavor to challenge any perception of cultures as radi-
cally distinct or hermetically sealed. Countering a dangerous tendency also
emphasized by Gerald Larson (1988) and Michaelle Browers (2008)—that
comparing Western with non-Western philosophical writing fosters the mis-
perception that these traditions developed in parallel, independently of one
another—Euben focuses on ambivalent treatments of Western modernity
in Arab thought, illuminating internal fi ssures in both that belie their pre-
sumed opposition. If historical designations of this sort (West, non-West,
Islam, etc.) cannot simply be dispensed with, since they are forms of repre-
sentation embedded in mythologies that anchor our understanding (Zerilli,
cited in Euben 1999, 12), and, however imperfectly, remain short-hand for
constellations of sources, issues, and methods of argumentation that while
constructed through post facto agendas produce family resemblances and
recognizable attributes (Godrej 2009), they still obscure messy and inter-
penetrating histories. After all, argues Euben, the possibility of engaging in
comparative discussions is a function not of radical diff erence but mutual
indebtedness of worlds now juxtaposed as discrete. In the case of “the West”
and “Islam,” both are fundamentally shaped by Semitic traditions, texts
considered classical within Europe were reintroduced to its readers through
preserved Arabic translations, and the Golden Age of Islamic thought was
defi ned by eff orts to forge syncretic fusions of Greek and Islamic resources.
And one can easily fi nd elements of prescriptive accounts of the project
of comparative political theory that resemble that for which I have been
advocating. Consider, fi rst, Hwa Yol Jung’s suggestion, drawing on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, that comparative political theory off ers an approach to a
more genuine universalism, one of “lateral” rather than “faceless” claims
and aspirations (Jung 1999, 2002, 2007; Merleau-Ponty 1964). Second, is
Euben’s suggestion that comparative work “makes possible many unimag-
ined . . . conversations . . . that raise the distinct possibility that non-Western
perspectives may provide new . . . answers to [the West’s] old questions . . .
[ones] that actually transform the . . . questions themselves” (1999, 11).
Th e diffi culty, however, is that the conceptual apparatus of “compara-
tive thinking,” for all of its necessary and skillful qualifi cation, especially
by Euben, Godrej, and Browers, while garnering professional permission
to undertake various intellectual projects, is in some cases misleading and
in others, as Andrew March (2009) has suggested, even a misnomer. After
all, much of the work going on within this rubric is not comparative at all,
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206 Conclusion
but instead sustained and sophisticated studies of rich domains of thought
beyond Western Europe and Anglo-America of what were once called area
specialists (see, for instance, Jenco 2007). For work that is premised on grap-
pling with converging diff erence, there are other concerns. For March, for
instance, if a driving impetus to comparative endeavors is to redress detri-
mental exclusions of important voices that have left the canon highly par-
tial, this is not merely a comparative consideration but instead an eff ort to
produce better political theory more generally. It is in that spirit, that I have
undertaken to read Rousseau through Fanon or that Godrej (2006) reads
John Rawls with and against Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Th e value
and implications of Fanon and Gandhi are not limited to their particular
contexts but more broadly illuminating to the world of thought. For March,
by contrast, a bold and generative comparative approach would require the
very distinctness of units of analysis that we have thus far been blurring. It
is for this reason that he contends that the best candidates for comparative
theoretical explorations are in elucidating normative confl icts over the terms
of social cooperation from within discrete religious and moral traditions of
the implicated adherents. For it is in these cases that the boundaries to be
negotiated remain clear (March 2009, 563–65).
For Leigh Jenco, the problems are rather diff erent: First, if one wants to
avoid uncritically reproducing the ethnocentric categories that comparative
political theory seeks to transcend, one must attend as much to the method
of inquiry in culturally situated traditions of scholarship as to their sub-
stantive ideas. Th ese approaches to how one undertakes one’s scholarship
are intended to make distinct traditions accessible to committed and hard-
working outsiders. Th is mode of diff erence is overridden in the reifi cation of
dialogue, however. Even if Jung and Dallmayr do at times suggest protracted
fusions of horizons in lateral universals, the prevailing skeptical and herme-
neutic emphasis is on mutually illuminating potentially transformative,
tolerant conversation. Th is poses troubles often also put to Habermasian
discourse models. In sum, such approaches frequently fail to grapple with
the non-neutrality of language and the inadequacy of framing speech as
inherently discrete from the logic of force and violence. Th e egalitarianism
assumed for dialogic purposes may not be a feature of the cultures brought
together and eff orts to move beyond the limits of dialogue produces a hor-
rible circle: either one makes decisions concerning rules and protocol in
advance with the implication that the dialogue itself becomes the covert
enforcer of those norms or the method requires an endless dialogue about
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Conclusion 207
dialogue within which conversation of other subject matter can never begin
(Jenco 2007, 744).
It is striking that Dallmayr’s (1996) classifi catory scheme of modes of
cross-cultural encounter includes conquest, conversion, assimilation/accul-
turation, partial assimilation/cultural borrowing, liberalism/minimal en-
gagement, confl ict/class struggle, and dialogical engagement. Th e fi rst three,
for him, are hegemonic and hierarchical models which comparative political
theory should eschew as destructive. Partial assimilation, in his account,
takes place on an unequal basis and can easily follow a melting pot model,
one of ambivalent syncretism, or of genuine mutual transformation. While
liberal models tend toward isolation, the alternatives of struggle are too con-
tentious and unstable. For Dallmayr, it is therefore dialogue that exemplifi es
respect for otherness beyond assimilation and radical untranslatability.
Ideally, argues Michaelle Browers (2008), comparative political theory
would involve each participant viewing him or herself as subject and ob-
ject. More frequent, I would suggest, is the diffi culty of double conscious-
ness as articulated by W. E. B. DuBois, that both the dominant and less
powerful counterparts see themselves through the eyes of the former. Still,
Browers emphasizes, most instances of conceptual change, for all of their
inequality, more closely resemble partial assimilation and cultural borrow-
ing in what amounts to instances of transculturation or a process through
which more marginal groups often on the political defensive, if unable to
determine the content of what is relevant to their refl ection on political
life, select and invent among ideological elements from more metropoli-
tan cultures, determining how they will be used. Conceptual innovation,
in such circumstances emerges precisely from what a more Skinnerian ap-
proach would consider mistranslation: Rather than trying, as specialists and
scholars would, to assure that we demonstrate due respect for otherness by
understanding the ideas’ meaning in their original context of emergence,
we simply put them to work in our own life worlds (Browers 2008, 16). Ex-
amples of fruitful mistranslation are multiple. In artistic domains we might
consider Vincent Van Gogh’s eff orts to develop a Dutch style of painting
through emulating the bright, sharp line and color of Japanese prints circu-
lating in his day, or the unique sound of British singer Sting’s early eff orts to
sing Caribbean reggae. In politics, observe Danny Postel’s recent refl ections
on the vibrancy of engagements with classical liberalism in the context of
contemporary Iran. For Browers, in sum, political creativity and agency are
more evident not in the model of dialogue through which one tries to assure
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208 Conclusion
that one has gotten Gramsc’s or de Tocqueville’s conceptions of civil society
right but in instances of transculturation. In the latter, Gramsci is a resource
on whose partial assimilation one might build, not an imperative whose
authentic replication demands duplicating original predicaments that may
well prove irrelevant.
I would add an additional fear to the criticism of the preference for toler-
ant dialogue over the empirically informed considerations of how political
conceptual innovation more likely transpires. Th e scholarly work that has
emerged in response to Dallmayr’s still very recent clarion call and deliber-
ate creation of professional space both at meetings and through publishing
venues, has been a tremendous resource for those who remain primarily in-
terested in the history of ideas and its approximation as the canon as well
as those concerned with more contentious contemporary debates. It has
revealed as lacking in rigor the vast majority of defenses of the adequacy of
the straight march repeated in course after course and reprinted afresh each
year in countless new textbooks from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and
Aquinas to Machiaveilli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche. Al-
though works eminently worthy of careful and repeated study, the tenacity of
this line-up would have many conclude that nothing less than this historical
surge of reason, at least in the political realm, leapt from fi fth century Athens
to the Roman Empire to the warring city-states that became Italy to Western
Europe. One cannot simply amend by assimilation fi gures from Confucius
and Mencius to Alfarabi and Averroes to Gandhi and Sayyid Qutb since, at
the very least, they reveal the current absence of a viable singular framework
for conceptualizing the moments that comprise a world history of political
ideas. What has for centuries been referred to as the “Dark Ages” was, after
all, a classical period within Islamic civilizations (Robinson 2001). And there
was no substantive counterpart to the “Middle Ages” in Chinese history.
Additionally, in terms of more contemporary debates, comparative politi-
cal theory has aimed explicitly to counter Samuel Huntington’s (1993, 1996)
framing of the post–Cold War moment as a “clash of civilizations” seeking
out self-illuminating dialogues with precisely those deemed “enemies.”
Still, although avowedly framing and contributing to a global dialogue
that would incorporate the Americas, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the full
diversity of the expanse called Asia, it is unmistakable that, but for a few
very important exceptions, comparative political theory of the last decade
has revolved almost exclusively around discussion between Euro-America
and the East Asian, East Indian, and Muslim worlds. Th is is particularly
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Conclusion 209
worrying when several recent titles suggest that comparative political theory
has in many cases been reformulated as “inter-civilizational dialogue” (Dall-
mayr and Manoochehri 2007; Gebhardt 2008; Bowden 2008).
One might attribute this pattern of inclusion and exclusion to a con-
tingent matter of the biographies, skills, and professional commitments of
the subfi eld’s pioneers and to its still early stages. It is after all both unreal-
istic and unfair to expect what remains a small community of people to do
every thing. And every emergent scholarly area will be an expression of the
projects of those that inaugurate them. One could emphasize as well the
sustained study and engagement required to redress the genuine dearth of
scholarly work focused on Arab and Chinese and Indian thought.
Still, these patterns seem too consistent and unremarked upon to express
only these indiosyncracies. Th ey mirror after all something all too familiar: the
ethnographic paradigms of the age of exploration and colonialism through
which the West typically viewed its non-Western counterparts. East and West
Asia have been the object of derisive European and US “orientalizing” that
amounts to egregious forms of misrecognition. At the same time, there has
seldom been doubt—one could go so far as to say that orientalizing was a per-
verse expression of precisely the acknowledgment—that ideas, complex civi-
lizations, and genuine political challenges can and would continue to emerge
from these regions. As Frederick G. Whelan (2009) recently illustrated, al-
though it became a commonplace in European thought, if at times disputed,
to disparage eastern civilizations as despotic and fundamentally lacking in in-
dividual dynamism, these regions were those of “sultans” as opposed to those,
in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment parlance, of “savages.”
Perhaps one could suggest that these occlusions are not that but instead a
function of a particular academic division of labor in which some regions are
the purview of postcolonial thought (even though it too increasingly mir-
rors similar patterns of monopoly and exclusion with East, South, and West
Asian writers eclipsing their African and Latin American counterparts in at-
tention and citation), and of African America, Latin American, and Ethnic
Studies, and others of comparative political theorizing. Th e diffi culty here
is, as already noted, all of the civilizations brought into dialogue have some
historical experience with conquest and colonization and writers studying
all of them draw, in varying degrees, on relevant postcolonial insights.
One could contend as well that although always porous, some civiliza-
tional groups remain more distinctive, more intact, more possible to bring in
as the discrete units that many comparativists, with the exception of March,
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210 Conclusion
aim to problematize. In other words, for all of the emphasis to the contrary,
when it comes to who studies which regions, comparative political theory
still needs geopolitico-spatial designators of the “near” and the “far,” the
“here” and the “there,” with thought from the African and Latin diaspora
seemingly appearing either too near or too far, neither quite here nor there,
both insuffi ciently the same and inadequately diff erent.
Some comparative political theorists draw on writing from the African
and Latin worlds in the same way as they might engage Habermas or Fou-
cault or Gadamer, emphasizing that such writers are within and a substan-
tial part of the inheritance of the “West” they are putting into conversation
with thinkers propagandistically portrayed as foreign and dangerous. After
all, Dallmayr’s typology of cross-cultural encounters is framed around refl ec-
tions concerning the year 1492 and when describing the coconstitution of
metropoles and colonies, he draws on the writing of Emmanuel Eze, Charles
Mills, and Paulin Hountondji. Moving beyond the circumscribed role of
informants to that of cotheorists is after all one aim of what I am calling the
creolizing of political theory. Still, it would be overly sanguine to take these
examples as a depiction of the fi eld overall. In it, when it comes to Africa, the
Caribbean, and Latin America, in fact, what is evident is the opposite of the
fallacy feared, a failure to see that while not radically alien, these regions do
pose distinctive questions that should inform more global debates.
One could fi nally suggest that the periods of primary interest in Africa
were those marked by crises and precipitous declines so that, save Muslim
North Africa, the study of its political thought would necessarily be work
better conducted by archaeologists and historians. On the one hand, most
comparativists do not defi ne political theory narrowly and, in the areas to
which they are committed, utilize the full range of scholarly approaches.
More pertinent, however, is that much of this work is focused on modern
thought in which there is ample written political refl ection in the Africana
diaspora, Caribbean, and Latin America, most of it composed in English,
French, and Spanish.
In the absence of commentary on the overrepresentation of some regions
of interlocutors over others therefore it would be easy to surmise that the
constellation of thinkers and writers is an expression of the ongoing expec-
tation that thought that might be historic and potentially universal does
not emerge from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, or that if it
does, it is unlikely to be suffi ciently distinctive to be framed as a genuinely
comparative rather than relative term.
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Conclusion 211
Although I am certain that this is not its aim, what is particularly disturb-
ing is that taken together the work that currently comprises comparative
political theory, while framed against the explosive recent writings of Sam-
uel Huntington, appears to affi rm his (and G. W. F. Hegel’s) geographical
estimations of political value and distinctive impact in the realm of historic
thought. Recall that in both his infamous essay and book, Huntington men-
tions African civilization as possibly having some signifi cance for the future
and Latin America as a target for incorporation into Western civilization to
help counter dangers of Confucian and Islamic confi gurations. And most
controversially, in the longer of his two accounts, Huntington dismisses
Haiti out of hand: “While Haiti’s elite has traditionally relished its cultural
ties to France, Haiti’s Creole language, Voodoo religion, revolutionary slave
orgins, and brutal history combine to make it a lone country . . . ‘the neigh-
bor nobody wants,’ a truly kinless country” (1996, 136–37).
I will respond to this fi nal point in a moment, but would like to state
clearly in advance that creolizing, with all its attendant diffi culties, suggests
that the engagement of scholars frequently ignored would improve the over-
all quality of political theorizing itself, particularly as it seeks to inform chal-
lenges that are ever more global.
If comparative political theory has been forged out of an eff ort to in-
tervene in debates over the meaning and possibilities of cultural and civili-
zational diff erence, the work that I am designating that of grappling with
“disavowal” begins with a distinct but related challenge: Stated most point-
edly, Susan Buck-Morss (2009) insists that in a moment like our own, com-
parable in signifi cant ways to that of the Age of Revolution, we need a
universalizing history. Th is is an endeavor that cannot emerge from readily
designated units of analysis or, in the case of comparative political theory,
the civilizations and cultures most easily recognized as such. For it is, she
provocatively suggests, at the edges of cultures, in the moments when they
betray and are betrayed, that more subterranean forms of political identifi -
cation, those that better approximate universal aims, emerge.
Work on disavowal then critically explores the intellectual and politi-
cal work required to create, normalize, and reproduce spatial divides and
designations that foist particular projects of order on practices and people
that resisted them. Studiously avoiding the replication of such uncritical
mappings, in Buck-Morss and Sybille Fischer’s case, the marginalization of
the study of Haiti in historiography devoted to the advent of New World
and European modernity that Huntington echoes, is at the core of free-
F6183.indb 211F6183.indb 211 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
212 Conclusion
ing historical imagination. More specifi cally then, if comparative political
theory addresses major lacunae in political theory through serious theoreti-
cal engagement with “threatening” members of the non-West, work explor-
ing “disavowal” has also magnifi ed and complicated the project of the West
but by exploring its coconstituting relations with its own “darker sides”
(Mignolo 2003). Informed by Black and Caribbean Studies, “disavowal”
therefore treats fi gures and regions that have more typically been sites of
internal projection and denial as the focus of substantive engagement and as
resources for political thinking.
Against eff orts to explain the ongoing, systematic marginalization of the
centrality of histories of colonialism and enslavement to the development of
the modern West through the concepts of silence or unthinkability, Fischer
(2006) advances disavowal. Disavowals, she explains, involve the embrac-
ing of two contradictory beliefs that in psychoanalytic theory is consid-
ered a response to traumatic events, or to theories and occurrences that are
too threatening openly to entertain. Attempts to suppress or to repudiate
memory do not create silence, as has often been suggested by historians
and historiographers; instead, emphasizes Fischer, they create strange traces
of evasion. In particular, these residual marks are left by eff orts to limit the
appearance of less desirable subjects, to keep them beneath the terrain of
politics, from participation in discursive practices in their own right.
For Fischer, Hegel’s engagement with Haiti demonstrates precisely this
process.
At the center of Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, which is also his philoso-
phy of history, reason, and modernity, is his dialectic between the lord and
his bondsman or the master and his slave. Countless Hegel scholars have
looked for the origins of this idea, tending, in the main, to ascribe it to other
philosophers that Hegel studied, in particular to Aristotle. Th e assumption,
in other words, was that the metaphor was not to be read historically and
that if Hegel was considering concrete instances of servitude, they were likely
those of fi fth-century Athens. Th is should strike scholars as odd and anach-
ronistic, emphasizes Buck-Morss, since Hegel was such an avowed modern-
ist: When he wrote about economic life, he drew on the writings of Adam
Smith. When he argued about the historical realization of freedom, he grap-
pled with the meaning of the events of the French Revolution. Why would
it, she asks, never enter the mind of generations of interpreters that Hegel’s
frequent references to slaves in the Philosophy of Right and insistence upon
slaves needing to free themselves through direct confrontations and struggle
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Conclusion 213
not have refl ected his eff ort to make theoretical sense of his daily reading
material in the unfolding coverage in Minera and other news sources that
documented the events transpiring in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue?
Th e failure to name Haiti, in Fischer’s words, “indicates that his is a
knowledge that cannot be recognized as such, a knowledge caught . . . out-
side the temporality of error and correction, invoked, but not integrated in
the great narrative” (2006, 369). Crucial is that he falls silent at the end of the
master-slave dialectic, “at the very moment when revolutionary slaves might
have appeared” (ibid.). When the Phenomenology resumes, writes Fischer,
the masters and slaves have vanished, and the locus of the text is again safely
and indisputably within Europe. His is a discussion that, for all its insight,
is wrought with ambivalence, fascination, fear, and an inability to name
its content. If comparative political theory confronts and rejects eff orts to
frame the challenge posed by people designated as enemies as “cultural” or
“religious” rather than political, what of those people and moments past and
present that remain disavowed? Th is is crucial for Buck-Morss since Hegel’s
refl ections on the actual revolution of Caribbean slaves is a universalizing
moment, one “when the dialectical logic of recognition becomes visible as
the thematics of world history . . . [when theory] and reality converged . . .
[and] philosophy burst out of the confi nes of academic theory and became
a commentary on the history of the world” (2009, 59–60).
In fact, the early Haitian Constitutions as the culminations of and eff orts
to continue the Revolution represented a signifi cant refi guring, or what I
would call creolization, of Enlightenment ideas. Taking the French Con-
stitution of 1791 and the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 as their models, they
reworked them to include an unequivocal ban on slavery and racial subor-
dination and open asylum to those escaping from enslavement and colonial
genocide. In addition, in the Dessalines Constitution of 1805, all Haitians,
including naturalized German and Polish women, were to be designated
“black,” here eliminating the previous designations that encompassed over
a hundred diff erent degrees of black mixture (Fischer 2006). “Black” there-
fore became, as it would in the Black Consciousness movement in South
Africa in the mid-1960s, a political rather than racial identity (Biko 2002;
Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson 2008; L. Gordon 2008b). Fischer
argues that these were clear examples of seizing the language of the col-
onizer and “submitting it to radical resignifi cation” (2006, 371), the very
way that we have seen Raquel Romberg redefi ne the imitation that marks
creolization.
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214 Conclusion
In addition, these early constitutions challenged nation-state models of
narrowly defi ned citizenship. Th e antislavery movement had been thor-
oughly transnational. Built out of collaborations conducted and maintained
in Creole, it brought together slaves born in Africa, Caribbean leaders, and
abolitionists from throughout the hemisphere. Fischer explains that in early
constitutions, little is said about citizenship, while allowances for taking
up residency are expansive. Fischer argues that direct revolutionary action
was replaced by a series of immigration schemes, those for instance, that
welcomed white men who married black women (anywhere in the world)
and off ered money for each slave brought to Haiti rather than to slavehold-
ing territories (2006, 373). At the same time, in both instances, universal
racial equality and transnationalism ran up against the project of developing
economic and political independence in a world in which enslavement was
widespread and colonialism expanding into Africa and Asia. Nonetheless,
these eff orts represented the taking of ideas that had been posed as universal
but had in fact only applied to French citizens and trying to expand their
reach to anyone who could land on Haitian soil.
Buck-Morss states conclusively:
Th e defi nition of universal history that begins to emerge is this: rather
than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are
recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of
collective cultural identities . . . [it] is in the discontinuities of history
that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give
expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in
our empathic identifi cation with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that
we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity
exists in spite of culture and its diff erences. (2009, 133)
She elaborates, here sounding much more like Benhabib than like Taylor
or Kymlicka, that it is in nonidentifi cation with established collectivities
that “subterranean solidarities” can emerge with “a chance of appealing
to universal, moral sentiment.” Against the grain of comparative politi-
cal theory, she writes, “It is not through culture, but through the idea of
culture’s betrayal that consciousness of a common humanity comes to be”
(ibid.).
She off ers by way of example the moment when slaves recognize their
enslavement as a betrayal of the project of civilization or when Napolean’s
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Conclusion 215
soldiers refused to do as they were summoned, seeing the drowning of Af-
ricans struggling for their freedom as a contradiction of the stated ideals of
the country for which they fought. Such instances, she insists, suggest the
inadequacy of the language of “multiple modernities” and politics of “diver-
sality” or “multiversality,” moves that would relativize evident inhumanities
that are repeated again and again across separate cultural contexts.
Kwasi Wiredu (1996) and Michelle Moody-Adams (1997), as mentioned
in Chapter 5, have skillfully made precisely this challenge to eff orts to frame
moral life as divided by untranslatable, radical cultural diff erence. Th ey con-
tend that the scale of cultural impermeability has been exaggerated by much
anthropological work and its popularization by spokespeople of particular
given cultures. In Wiredu’s account, to be human is to participate in the world
of culture which necessarily includes universal capacities for language, com-
munication, and methods of transmitting knowledge, the particular forms
of which are historically contingent. If one aims to specify principles of con-
duct the presence of which makes human communal survival tolerable, these
prove remarkably consistent: Th ey arise from an eff ort to address the fact
that not everybody is inclined to be concerned about others all or most of the
time. Eff orts to counter this through arguments for sympathetic impartial-
ity again prove strikingly consistent across cultures: Although the particular
contexts of meaning suggest diff erent ways of enacting truthfulness, chastity,
or courage, their estimation as valuable remains. Serious cross-cultural moral
disagreement, after all, argues Moody-Adams, requires a backdrop of basic
forms of agreement on a number of moral beliefs. She therefore rejects the
commonplace within political liberalism that rationally irresolvable moral
disagreement is inevitable, arguing instead that what is evident is a lack of
will and commitment to confronting and actually trying to negotiate points
of contention. It is not that there are no methods for such adjudication;
what is absent is a desire to use them. Both suggest that treating cultures as
if they were themselves of special moral value, key kernels of the essential or
authentic identities of their adherents, mischaracterizes the nature of culture
itself in an eff ort to place beyond reach critical inquiry into its internal dif-
ferentiation and broader consequences. Much like Buck-Morss, they reject
the view that the fact of diversity amounts to plural discrete truths.
It is dangerous, however, concludes Buck-Morss (2009, 144), to salvage
the study of the Haitian Revolution simply as a story of victory, of singular
triumph of right over wrong, since doing so requires an antithetical other or
F6183.indb 215F6183.indb 215 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
216 Conclusion
collective enemy, inevitably reintroducing an entrenched barrier and a cycle
of victim and avenger. We must instead, more modestly, understand such
ruptures as fl eeting moments of clarity and radical antislavery of this kind as
belonging to no particular collective but to everyone (147–48). Seeking such
universalizing moments, states Buck-Morss, requires valuing precisely the
unhistorical histories dismissed by Hegel and anomalies, including those of
collective action, that break with prevalent conceptions of coherent narra-
tives of progress and cultural continuity.
It is no coincidence, in other words, that those people, groups, and na-
tions that are absent from comparative intercivilizational conversation are
precisely those that occupy what Enrique Dussel has called “modernity’s
underside” and, in turn, that the readiest interlocutors are those writing and
thinking within empires, both those that are emergent and consolidating
and those in periods of decay. One of many clear legacies of colonialism and
enslavement, of the construction of categories of people as “savage,” is that
they are either incorporated within the West all the while being disavowed
or assumed to lack suffi ciently distinctive cultural traditions, accumulated
learning that represents a unique perspective.
Th ey remain largely, as Anne Norton argues, drawing on British anthro-
pologist Victor Turner’s Th e Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, a
liminal category, those only partially or ambivalently included in social and
political structures. She explains that “[because] they stand on the bound-
aries of identity, they are often central to debates over those boundaries”
(2004a, 41). Others make metaphorical use of literal features of their lives
to make sense of their own, identifying with their exclusion or unjust treat-
ment or suggesting that their predicament should be extended to still others.
Norton writes, “Th e primary importance of the liminal [is], however, semi-
otic. Th ey serve as signs, even when they [act] as agents, and their defi ning
traits [are] often stripped from them and assumed by others” (42). Examples
of this process abound: think, for example, of American Revolutionaries,
many of whom were directly or indirectly involved with the US slave trade,
who charged the British with enslaving them through “taxation without
representation” or of the centrality of the language of homelessness for de-
scribing what it is to live diasporically or to experience forms of alienation
fundamental to the modern world or of the many young men and women
who don elements of US or Caribbean blackness, at times suggesting that
they are in fact better embodiments of it than black people themselves. In
a quintessential example of what it is to be liminal, in such instances, black
F6183.indb 216F6183.indb 216 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
Conclusion 217
people are told that they are not only bad at being white people but also
bad at being themselves (Gordon and Gordon 2009). As groups of people
pivotal to the construction of political identity but disavowed as political
agents, neither clearly inside nor out, the condition of the liminal must be a
central focus of work aimed at creolization.
Creolization, then, aims to draw on the space for a more rigorous ap-
proach to the world of political theory opened by comparative work, while
problematizing the ways in which “comparativism” may either problematize
itself to the point of incoherence or prove the wrong name. It also builds
on the work of disavowal, but while remaining cautious of the dangers out-
lined by Buck-Morss, rejects both a reluctance toward constructing new
collectivities and the assumption that all cultures must collapse into being
substantively similar to historical, national ones. As I have already explored,
one does not step outside of culture (it is instead disclosed through a variety
of forms of symbolic life). When its inadequacies are revealed it is precisely
in light of something else. Out of disappointments, one might, in ways that
were not so before, be more open to resources and identifi cations through
which to carve homes in the world. Th ese will be highly imperfect, but
avoiding them is not possible.
What is more, in such instances, it is not true that all choices amount to more
of the fl awed same—that articulating a culture through blackness is nothing
more than trading one particular exclusive identity for another. “Blackness” as
intended here is not an uninterpreted phenotypical identifi cation, but instead
the range of political connotations attributed to it. Th is spectrum includes
enslavement and its radical challenging to being forced outside of political
membership and aiming through rejecting such exclusion to rearticulate the
terms of belonging. In other words, blackness betokens what comes of these
contradictions. As the liminal exception and the outside, through its engage-
ment we develop a more complete picture of the idealized world for which we
strive and the compromises on which it has been premised.
Finally, it would be misleading to suggest that the call for a more re-
sponsive study and engagement of political life has been limited to com-
parative theorists and those of disavowal. Indeed, in addition to an at least
three-decade-long project of returning political theory to “the real” (see,
for example, Shapiro 2007; Geuss 2008; Schwartz 2008; Isaac 1998; Tully
2008a, 2008b; Tronto 2004), there has been much discussion of problem- as
opposed to method-driven research (Shapiro, Smith, Masoud 2004). Th e
former suggests, in a kindred spirit to the discussion of the preceding pages,
F6183.indb 217F6183.indb 217 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
218 Conclusion
that scholarly work on politics should begin with a substantive question
“thrown up by” the world itself and only then turn to selecting the most ap-
propriate methods through which it might be illuminated (Shapiro 2004).
Criticisms of this view come in four main varieties. Th e fi rst advances that
such an approach would blur the lines between academic political science
and the best writing of journalists and historians; that to maintain a clear
and coherent role, the primary imperative of the former is to become more
rigorously scientifi c through prioritizing subjects of study that enable meth-
odological innovation. A second charge suggests that having problems de-
termine the selection of approaches will lead to disciplinary chaos admitting
of no standards of adjudication or comparison among multiple, competing
theories. In a third, which builds on the second, problem-driven approaches
do not surmount the messy terrain of interpretation and orienting commit-
ments. After all, how we choose and conceptualize a problem is already fun-
damentally informed by our existing theoretical and methodological lean-
ings. Finally, scholars historically aiming to try to solve social, political, and
economic problems through scholarly endeavors often end up inadvertently
serving state and corporate interests, forgetting that they cannot determine
or control the implications of or what will be done with their fi ndings (Nor-
ton 2004b). Th ese may well be selectively pruned to provide little more than
“scientifi c justifi cation” to already existing partisan positions (Piven 2004).
To the fi rst, the view that more rigorously scientifi c approaches will of-
fer a distinctively valuable view into political life has not been persuasively
demonstrated. Indeed, a science that would properly avail itself to all of the
complexly multidirectional relations of dependence and coconstitution that
defi ne the fi eld of politics would be “science” in such a unique sense that it
would unsettle and multiply the term itself, undercutting the eradication
of the sloppiness of pluralism that is sought through it. What is more, the
changing nature of the generation, availability, and circulation of informa-
tion has radically altered not only the internal life of the academy and fi eld
of journalism, but the relationship between them. Rather than diff erences
in focus and method, what increasingly diff erentiates the two are temporal
demands of publication and those of audience. Indeed, with some of the
most pressing transnational questions, whether of the pronounced vulner-
ability of labor or shifting ways that wars are fought, journalists have often
proven better poised to outline what scholars might then be in positions to
explore in greater depth.
F6183.indb 218F6183.indb 218 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
Conclusion 219
Th e second and third objections are perennial ones that only retreat when
the contours of intellectual conversation become suffi ciently sedimented to
occlude them. Ultimately, facing the challenge of adjudication in a rela-
tively anarchic fi eld is precisely what being rooted in a scholarly world is to
enable one to do. However, one sees precisely the opposite—in the face of
the sheer volume of people and publications, there is less and less willing-
ness to engage in original, if well-reasoned and informed, acts of judgment
and instead an intensifi ed deference to what already established principles
of evaluation demand. In other words, problem-driven inquiries recenter
the anxiety of responsibility that is at the core of all of our endeavors thus
by implication reemphasizing the value of scholarship on creolization that
illuminates situations of adjudication where standing rules are either not
available or no longer applicable.
Th ere is no doubt that it is dangerous if more and more research is com-
missioned and if intellectual agenda setting is dominated by think tanks. In
these cases, the questions that are to be explored are prematurely narrowed
to interests driven by priorities and occupations that may well be anti-
intellectual. What is more, fi ndings generated are only sought or heeded to
the extent that they buttress a priori positions that will not be challenged or
rearticulated by contradictory outcomes. And there is no doubt that what is
done with any fruit of scholarly or creative labor is idiosyncratic, unpredict-
able, and, in large part, out of the author’s hands.
At the same time, it is a mistake to frame all problem-driven work as nec-
essarily answering and serviceable to corporate imperatives. After all, what
of the work of Frantz Fanon or W. E. B. Du Bois? Th e former, as I have
argued, stated from the outset that his aim was to explore in order to dis-
mantle multiple forms of alienated human relations produced by projects of
negrifi cation. He proceeded seamlessly to draw on works in psychoanalysis
and literature and later in political economy and history in a heavily cre-
olized methodology. With Du Bois, his framing of African Americans as a
unique social scientifi c opportunity—to study the emergence of a race born
of forced displacement, coerced intermixing, slavery and then emancipa-
tion—led not only through his monumental thousand-page, Th e Philadel-
phia Negro, to the development of the fi eld of urban ethnography (including
the generation of previously nonexistent census data) but to a uniquely New
World form of sociology. Ironically, his eff orts to disclose and illuminate the
workings of modern racialization enabled him to produce a creolized study
F6183.indb 219F6183.indb 219 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
220 Conclusion
of complex societies that added to classical European concerns of class, secu-
larization, rationalization, and bureaucracy, particularities of the plantation
and its complex aftermath. Unlike his contemporaries who tried in making
their sociology rigorous to make it un-American, his writings continue to be
available in print and read in classrooms (Henry 2009).
Even if driven by problems, scholars will with good reasons adopt dis-
tinct approaches to their study. However, if some only reluctantly accept
the resulting methodological pluralism as the inability to explore particular
themes through randomized fi eld experiments, it can also illuminate the
distinctiveness of diff erent approaches through demonstrating the particular
kinds of question each might magnify or occlude (Wedeen 2004). Indeed
Rudra Sil (2004) suggests that breakthroughs in understanding phenomena
in the political world occur when eclectic scholars draw upon discrete in-
sights, practices, and empirics of otherwise separate research communities,
indicating new lines of inquiry. Th is is underscored by Robert Dahl’s (2004)
estimation of political science as concerned with relations among human
beings, groups, contingency, and agency that, as almost infi nite, should
make it clearly untenable that it emulate a fi eld like physics.
Th e tendency of once and necessarily creolized and creolizing disciplines
like political science to purify themselves through decreolization is most
likely a sign of both an eff ort to hide from demands of complex adjudica-
tion and of decay: it is at great political and intellectual expense that ever
narrower conversations continue, avoiding these vexing and ultimately in-
dispensable problems of evaluation and judgment.
It is true that creolization is not very popular at the moment, and that
the response to crises in sovereignty borne of ever more porous borders of all
kinds is to fi x those boundaries we seem able to control like fortresses. Th e
diffi culty is not only the Machiavellian insight that fortresses easily become
petrifi ed prisons, but that in making these the homes from which we think,
we retreat from a shared role in forging a shared political world.
Political life, after all, operates precisely within the messy and unpredict-
able options opened up by symbolic life—by the ability to forge generalities
that can be as manipulated and exploited as they can be used to mobi-
lize cross-cutting and unique scopes of identifi cation and obligation. If our
studies of this specifi c domain are to contribute to disclosing its fragile value
they too should possess these same irreducibly human qualities.
F6183.indb 220F6183.indb 220 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
221
Notes
introduction
1. Th is is no. 62 from If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Carson (2003).
2. Th is phrase appeared in one of Paula Wilson’s (2010) woodblock prints
titled “First Story.”
3. Th e project fi rst began as an exploration of the debates surrounding Rous-
seau’s general will that culminated in a discussion of Fanonian refl ections con-
cerning violence when I realized that although most scholars of Fanon focus
on his other immediate, named infl uences (Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, in par-
ticular), that many of his most central concerns and signifi cant contributions
revisited and reworked central dimensions of Rousseau’s political writings. I
began to wonder why this would be considered an unconventional conclusion
and whether the disciplinary norms that pointed in that direction might in fact
be obstacles to constructive contemporary thought. Th is led me in a more sys-
tematic way to conclude that what I was doing was an instance of creolization
with broader implications.
4. For further discussion of the politics of survival, see V. F. Cordova (2007).
She writes, “Th e value of survival is being able to recognize yourself after you’ve
managed to survive” (45).
5. For discussion of the concept of decreolization in the context of linguis-
tics, see Mufwene (1994).
6. Susan Buck-Morss (2000; 2009) has argued that the ease with which
scholars have marginalized the study of Haiti in accounts of modern history is
also a function of ways of conceiving of political geographies that have less to
do with space and time than commitments that require nearing and distanc-
ing. She challenges scholars not to naturalize these creative political feats, but
instead to make problematizing them the focus of our scholarship.
F6183.indb 221F6183.indb 221 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
222 Notes to pages 13–19
7. One might consider here the overrepresentation of many North African
Muslim practices in the heavily homosocial worlds of Italian organized crime.
Insightful commentary on this phenomenon was outlined in Celeste Morello’s
introductory comments to the screening of Th e Godfather II in the Politics in
Film Series at Temple University in April 2006. For her defi nitive study of Phil-
adelphia’s Mafi a and La Cosa Nostra, see Before Bruno, Books 1 and 2.
8. Similarly, when one reads the disparaging view that Marx and Engels
had of utopian and nostalgic brands of French socialism, one rarely thinks of
proto-socialist movements to which they refer as centrally involving the theo-
logical writings of thirteenth-century nuns, such as the Poor Clares, Catherine
of Siena, and Douceline of Digne, lay mystics including Mary of Oignies, Ida of
Nivelles, and Margaret Porete, and heretics (Robinson 2001, 50–51).
9. For examples of the former see Tommy Curry (2009) and Paget Henry
(2009a). For an example of the latter, see Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R.
Gordon (2009).
10. Th ere is some disagreement over how best to characterize Rousseau’s
contributions to such debates. More positive views are well represented by John
Oyatunde Isola Bewaji (2003) and Bernard Boxill (2005). Th e former empha-
sizes Rousseau’s unusual willingness to recognize Egyptian civilization as a pre-
cursor to that of Greece and Rome, as one of the litany of places that through
imperial enrichment developed arts and sciences at the price of their moral ruin.
Th e latter insists that while Caribs and Native North Americans were unques-
tionably framed by Rousseau as occupying an earlier, less corrupted stage of col-
lective development than European man, he made equally clear that the innate
abilities of human beings are the same the world over with the implication that
palpable diff erences were nothing more than the outcomes of contingent his-
torical events. Furthermore, in Rousseau’s early accounts, to be more developed
was also to have fallen further away from collective virtue. Louis Sala-Molins
(2006) is less forgiving: while Rousseau did not actively endorse theories that
buttressed the colonial policies of his day, his failure to be one of a small set
of critical voices given his tremendous capacity to speak and think against the
conforming grain was, in Sala-Molin’s view, worthy of condemnation. For a
lengthier account of these discussions, see Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts
(2009, 6–8).
1. delegitimating decadent inquiry
1. Th is can be found in Rousseau (1992e, 189).
2. Critics of Rousseau will no doubt accord great signifi cance, proof even, to
the (devilish) number of years that he lived.
3. For a complete photographic account of the many regions and towns that
Rousseau visited, see “Chronologie de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: présentation en
F6183.indb 222F6183.indb 222 12/2/13 9:26:57 AM12/2/13 9:26:57 AM
Notes to pages 19–20 223
photos de tous les lieux qu’il a habités et visités,” by Takuya Kobayashi, www
.rousseau-chronologie.com/.
4. See Robert Darnton (1984, 242). According to Darnton, publishers could
not print quickly enough to keep up with demand and began to rent copies
of the book by the hour and the day. Readers, profoundly moved by the text,
wrote to Rousseau in droves, creating, in Darnton’s account, the fi rst celebrity
author (243–44).
5. Rousseau managed to off end Catholics and Protestants in equal measure
by challenging (through the words of the Catholic vicar in Emile) the notions
of both original sin and divine Revelation. He thought, in addition, that he
was defending the ongoing indispensability of religion when he claimed that
all faiths could equally lead men and women to virtue. Th e position was taken
as “religious indiff erentism” and his books were banned in France and Geneva,
condemned from pulpits, and publicly burned. Warrants were made for his ar-
rest. Even when he found sanctuary in Môtiers in Neuchâtel, a canton of the
Swiss Confederation and protectorate of the Prussian crown under the protec-
tion of Lord Keith, his house was stoned. In response he took refuge in Great
Britain through the machinations of David Hume. Rousseau remained barred
from reentering France until 1770 though he returned earlier, in 1768, under the
pseudonym, Jean-Joseph Renou.
6. For the authoritative critical discussion of the notion of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s “authorship” of the French Revolution, see James Swenson (2000).
While Rousseau was initially buried at Ermenonville, he was interred sixteen
years after his death and placed, as a national hero, in the Panthéon in Paris.
Rousseau’s embrace as a celebrated native son in Geneva was longer in coming.
In 1834 a statue was erected on the Île Rousseau in Lake Geneva. In 2002, Es-
pace Rousseau, a museum located in his fi rst home, was opened to the public.
7. Th ere are some very important exceptions to this general rule. Strik-
ingly, they are, for the most part, female and, in many instances, also Jewish.
Consider, for example, the organizational work of Fanon’s daughter, Mireille
Fanon-Mendes France and of Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (both of Eastern Euro-
pean Jewish descent) that culminated in the 2007 UNESCO conference on
Frantz Fanon and the subsequent issue of Tumultes (Number 31, 2008), edited
by Herzbrun-Dayan.
8. Rousseau was unable to learn English while staying in Britain and made
few friends during his stay.
9. He was apprenticed as an engraver while still in Geneva and after leaving
briefl y attended a seminary with the vague idea of becoming a priest.
10. Indeed using Genevan identifi cation as the basis through which to at-
tack powerful nations, he painted it in terms that it could never in fact match.
Starobinski writes, “Hence he was doubly a rebel: the myth of Geneva with
F6183.indb 223F6183.indb 223 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
224 Notes to page 20
which he attacked France became reason for dissatisfaction with Genevan real-
ity. Rousseau’s rebellion quickly cut off all retreat, leaving only the inner re-
sources of feeling and language, only literature to fall back on” (1988, 337).
11. Damrosch notes that when Rousseau visited Geneva for the last four
months he would spend there, in addition to being entertained by aristocrats
(indeed spending too much time with them, in the eyes of some) and enjoy-
ing the scenery, he visited his old neighborhood and nurse. Th e people who
crowded around him in the “rue basses” were proud to see “that he was one
of them, and even prouder perhaps that despite his long absence and his elo-
quence, he had kept their accent” (Rousseau 2005, 249).
12. Fanon was born into a petit-bourgeois family that sent him to the most
prestigious lycée on the island. Th ere he encountered his mentor Aimé Césaire,
for whom he would campaign (for the position of parliamentary delegate from
Martinique to the First National Assembly of the Fourth Republic) when re-
turning home after being wounded and receiving the Croix de Guerre in World
War II.
13. See Alice Cherki’s (2006) description of the much-cited interview with
Frantz Fanon’s brother, Joby. While many Martinicans considered World War II
as one for, by, and of Europeans, Fanon insisted, citing the inspiring words of
a former lycée professor that “each time that liberty is aff ected, be we whites,
blacks, yellows, or kakos . . . I swear to you today that no matter where it may
be, each time that Freedom is threatened, I’ll be there.” Fanon was, however,
soon disappointed. In a letter to his parents dated April 12, 1945, one year after
he had left Fort-de-France, he wrote that he was defending an “obsolete ideal”
and implored them never to say that he had “died for a good cause.” No, he
stated, “I was wrong! Nothing can justify my defending the interests of white
farmers while he does not care himself ” (Djemaï 2001). Th e phenomenon of
liberal idealists radicalized by the double standards with which they were treated
as they risked their lives in dangerous military eff orts itself deserves a careful
study. A recent poignant example from China is Wai-keung Lau’s 2010 fi lm,
“Legend of the Fist: Th e Return of Chen Zhen,” starring Donnie Yen.
14. He wrote, “Th e Antilles Negro is more ‘civilized’ than the African, that
is, he is closer to the white man; and this diff erence prevails not only in back
streets and on boulevards but also in public service and the army. . . . Antilleans
who have done military service in Senegalese infantry regiments have Europe-
ans (whether from one’s own country or France) on one hand and Senegalese
on the other. . . . And yet many Antilles Negroes see nothing to upset them in
such European identifi cation; on the contrary, they fi nd it altogether normal.
Th at would be all we need, to be taken for niggers! Th e Europeans despise the
Senegalese, and the Antilles Negro rules the black roost as its unchallenged
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Notes to pages 20–21 225
master.” Fanon goes on to describe a story of Gaudaloupans trying to pass as
Martinicans only to be quickly found out (BSWM 26).
15. In addition to Fanon’s published writings, he also wrote three plays and
a dissertation while studying in Lyon.
16. Fanon writes, “I wanted to confi ne myself to the Antilles. But I was com-
pelled to see that the Antillean is fi rst of all a Negro . . . there are Negroes whose
nationality is Belgian, French, English; there are also Negro republics. . . . Th e
truth is that the Negro race has been scattered, that it can no longer claim unity.
Against all the arguments I have just cited, I come back to one fact: Wherever
he goes, the Negro remains a Negro. . . . Th ere is a quest for the Negro, the Ne-
gro is in demand . . . he is needed, but only if he is made palatable in a certain
way” (BSWM, 172–73, 176).
17. Th e Republic of Geneva was of course sovereign. Th e language zones in
the region antedated the borders of modern nation-states with the implication
that the French spoken in Switzerland was not imposed through conquest or
expansion. French writers are indeed not read as foreign in Geneva or Lausanne
and within both places local writers resent being relegated to the category of
the Francophone, as I am doing here, along with peoples to whom French was
introduced through colonialism. Still, comments Starobinski, “they are no hap-
pier to be simply subsumed in the French phenomenon. . . . Th ey want their
right to fi rst-class citizenship recognized while insisting that there is an essential
diff erence between Swiss literature and the literature of this or that region of
France” (1988, 334).
18. Sartre writes in Th e Words of his grandfather’s aspirations for him: “In
most of the lycées, the teachers of German were Alsatians who had chosen
France who had been given their posts in reward for their patriotism. Caught
between two nations, between two languages, their studies had been somewhat
irregular, and there were gaps in their culture. Th at made them suff er. Th ey
also complained that they were left out of things in the academic community
because of their colleagues’ hostility. I would be their avenger; I would avenge
my grandfather. Grandson of an Alsatian, I was at the same time a Frenchman
of France. Karl would help me acquire universal knowledge. I would take the
royal road: in my person, martyred Alsace would enter the École Normale Su-
périeure, would pass the teaching examination with fl ying colors, and would
become that prince, a teacher of letters” (1964, 155–56).
19. We could add to the list all of the born Frenchmen and women whose
thought was signifi cantly infl uenced by time spent in or the sustained study
of events unfolding in what was then called “French North Africa.” Françoise
Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2011, 12–21) recently argued that almost all of the
radical left social thought of the 1960s in France was informed by direct experi-
F6183.indb 225F6183.indb 225 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
226 Notes to page 21
ences of writers with wars in Algeria. US readers of these French writers have,
they suggest, divorced the works from this creolizing context in ways that ob-
scure their actual inspiration. Lionnet and Shih contend that Vietnam exercised
a comparable eff ect on left US political writing of the same period.
20. A similar point might be made about quintessentially US writers, that
most were immigrants who in their project of embodying Americanness in fact
played a role in inventing it through their compelling articulations.
21. Th en a French colony, Martinique has since become an overseas depart-
ment of France. In the racialized hierarchical schemes that Fanon encountered
in North Africa, the most signifi cant dividing line was between Europeans and
“natives” (or native Africans), while Antillians, who were called “blacks from
the old colonies,” were in between (Ehlen 2001, 53–60). Felix Germain (2011)
argues that French policies from the mid-nineteenth century onward elevated
West Indian subjects over their African counterparts, as the West Indies re-
ceded in all but geopolitical and symbolic importance. “Indeed, as the French
colonized sub-Saharan Africa,” he writes, “they began to use the French West
Indies to showcase the success of French colonial policies” (Germain 2011, 102).
Many West Indians worked in the French colonial service in Africa, becoming
“walking billboard[s] for the empire . . . advertis[ing] that France rewarded its
colonial subjects” and that “colonized people appreciated receiving the gift of
French civilization” (103). What became known as the vieilles colonies included
Guadeloupe and Martinique, Saint-Domingue, French Guiana, Louisiana,
Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and Isle de France (now Mauritius). Th ese pro-
duced sugar, tobacco, coff ee, cocoa, cotton, indigo, roucou, cochineal, vanilla,
spices, woods, and decorative materials including pearl and tortoise shell (Do-
bie 2010, 2–3).
22. For a rich discussion of the particularity of eighteenth-century philo-
sophical engagements with newly foreign lands see Frederick Whelan (2009)
and Sankar Muthu (2003). Th e latter writes, “the prevailing attitude toward
non-Western countries had not yet hardened into one of imperious (and im-
perial) contempt, as was to happen in the nineteenth century” (6–7). Th is ac-
count of the very diff erent character of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
attitudes toward the non-European world is affi rmed by Catherine A. Rein-
hardt (2006).
23. Voltaire observed, “these countries, which one can scarcely perceive on a
globe, produce in France an annual circulation of sixty million in merchandise.”
Th is passage, from Essai sur les moeurs, was, Madeleine Dobie writes (2010),
added in the 1770s. Th is is Dobie’s translation.
24. It is no accident that the trope of the state of nature, while developed two
centuries earlier, was the centerpiece of early modern European and especially
F6183.indb 226F6183.indb 226 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
Notes to pages 21–22 227
liberal thought—that outlining the ideal requirements of legitimate governance
began with a detour to states of individuals living outside of recognizable po-
litical societies. Although all three of its most canonical articulators—Th omas
Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau—insisted that it was a situation that had
never existed in history, all, as readily, in moments of potential argumentative
despair, pointed as evidence to the New World. See, for example, chapter 13 of
Leviathan and chapter 5, “Of Property,” in Second Treatise of Government; for
discussion, see Muthu (2003, 7, 22–23, 200) and Srinivas Aravamudan (2009).
Vividly impressing especially political thinkers, images of it still required imagi-
native interpretation and elaboration. See, for instance, Frederick Whelan’s
exploration of the impact of encounters with the non-Western world on the
thinking of David Hume (2009, chap. 1). Both outside and in, the Americas’
distance due to expansionary voyages, suddenly came within Europe’s temporal
and spatial orbit. Indeed, its peoples were typically framed as having remained
in a permanent state of Europe’s and, by extension, man’s prehistory. However,
if for Hobbes and Locke that meant that these were places that signifi ed wild
and undomesticated, primitive beginnings or aberrational states of exception
against which the order of organized political life was measured, for Rousseau,
they inspired longing. Indeed the fi gure of the Carib, who rejected the encroach-
ing allures of French civilization, embodied the naturally free and good origins
of all of humankind and the standard through which alternatives to Western
European modernity might be thought.
25. In the mid-eighteenth century France was the world’s leading producer
of sugar; by the 1780s, what is now Haiti produced close to one half of the sugar
consumed in Europe and the Americas (Dobie 2010, 3–4). Th is was because of
the greater effi cacy of French planters who extracted 25 percent more sugar per
acre than their British counterparts in Jamaica.
26. Th e British and French sugar islands (especially Jamaica and Saint
Domingue) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imported a lion’s share
of African captives into, in Trouillot’s words, “what were not simply societies
that had slaves [but] slave societies . . . Th e northern equivalent would be for the
whole continental United States to look like Alabama at the peak of its cotton
career” (1997, 18). US fi gures do not include the colony.
27. Trouillot (1997) investigates how, given the respective numbers of people
involved, the symbolic relevance of slavery to sociohistorical explanations of the
subsequent societies is so much more pronounced in the United States than in
Brazil or the Caribbean.
28. Interestingly, unlike most of his contemporaries who when speaking of
“savages” wrote of the Huron or Iroquois, studiously avoiding the more prob-
lematic features of slavery and miscegenation associated with the Caribbean,
F6183.indb 227F6183.indb 227 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
228 Notes to pages 22–23
Rousseau’s references were to individuals from the Caribbean and Spanish
Americas.
29. Th e only published mention of black people on French soil by Rousseau
appears in a rather strange anecdote about him retold in Mercier’s Le Tableau de
Paris: “One day, I was accompanying Jean-Jacques Rousseau along the water-
front; he saw a black man who was carrying a sack of coal [on his head]; he
began to laugh and said to me, ‘Th at man is well-suited to his place. He will
not have to bother to clean the coal from his face; he is in his place. Would that
the others were as well-placed as he.’ And I saw him laugh again and follow
the black coalman with his eyes” (translation mine). I thank Favcal Falaky for
making me aware of this passage. Madeleine Dobie (2010), who also empha-
sizes the absence of mention of Africans transported in real chains (rather than
metaphorical ones at the core of classical republican theory) to the Americas,
suggests that Rousseau was more interested in the contrast between indigenous
and European people. She points to the only mention of colonial slavery in
Julie or the New Heloise where the protagonist, St. Preux witnesses the crimes
committed against his fellow man on the coasts of Africa and Brazil. Th e char-
acter wrote: “I turned aside my eyes in contempt, horror, and pity, at seeing the
fourth part of my fellow man turned into beasts for the servitude of others, I be-
moaned being a man.” Dobie, here in a very similar spirit to Louis Sala-Molins
(2006), still thinks that it is surprising given Rousseau’s scathing criticisms of
most existing forms of political authority, strong anthropological orientation,
and familiarity with travel literature, that he did not say more concerning these
themes.
30. Th is discussion draws on Catherine A. Reinhardt (2006). For further de-
tail of this period in French history and the complicity of many Enlightenment
writers, see her fi rst chapter, especially pages 27–35.
31. For further discussion of the politics of race and culture in the Ancien
Régime, see Peabody (1996).
32. For a discussion of the production of the distance between France and
its West Indian colonies, see Veronique Helenon (2011), “ ’Tis distance lends
enchantment to the view’—Distance as a Mode of Domination: Legal Elements
of the Slave and Colonial Periods.”
33. Dobie (2010) observes that in the 1760s those who did not oppose the
practice made the most transparent references to slavery available in French
writing. By contrast, more directly critical discussions did not emerge until the
1770s through 1780s and then as part of abolitionist arguments.
34. Consider on this point chapter 9 of Book I of On the Social Contract and
Rousseau’s 1741 tragedy, “Th e Discovery of the New World.” Th is is reprinted
in Rousseau (2004).
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Notes to pages 26–27 229
35. Rousseau’s fi rst publication was not a work in political theory but a song,
also published in Mercure de France in 1737. For the fi rst treatment devoted
solely to the First Discourse see Jeff J. S. Black (2009).
36. Rousseau’s descriptions of this event can be found in his January 1762
letter to Malsherbes and in Book VIII of his Confessions. Many commentators
have noted the similarity with Saint Augustine’s description of the experiences
(beneath a tree with a Bible) that culminated in his soul-searching autobio-
graphical writings.
37. Subsequent historical research has shown, on the basis of the publica-
tion of the announcement of the essay contest and the dates of Denis Diderot’s
imprisonment, that Rousseau must have encountered the announcement while
visiting Diderot on a day in October that was not particularly warm.
38. Th is was, in large part, due to fortunate and contingent circumstances:
the Dijon committee had connections at the Mercure de France, and its newly
appointed editor, the former Jesuit priest, Guillaume Raynal, was a friend of
Rousseau’s. He published an elogium and extracts of the First Discourse, along
with a series of criticisms and Rousseau’s replies. Diderot also helped to secure
the publication of the work as a pamphlet by a Paris bookseller, Noël-Jacques
Pissot.
39. Some anti-Rousseauian contemporaries of both men later suggested
that Diderot had implied in conversation that it was he who had initially sug-
gested that Rousseau answer the Academy’s question in the negative rather than
taking the affi rmative position that Rousseau had been considering when fi rst
arriving at Vincennes. Th is seems highly unlikely. As Damrosch (2005, 214)
has suggested, Rousseau’s position translated a lifetime of disappointment and
alienation into one that framed marginality as uniquely providing access to
truths unavailable to the well-adjusted. Additionally, the contrary position, if
advanced as anything but ironic, collided with all that the Encyclopédie rep-
resented. Starobinski (1988, 6), a highly creative and sympathetic reader of
Rousseau, argues that we witness in Rousseau the proceeding from particular
observations inductively toward establishing reasons that in a tone of abstract
learning conceal personal disappointments and failures. He is able to give his
own nostalgia, for the period in his childhood prior to his fi rst experience of
being wrongly accused, an objective history the certitude of which is fortifi ed
by his feeling of remembering.
40. Rousseau’s assessments of his own work could be scathing. When ap-
proached about the possibility of publishing an essay that he had begun and
abandoned writing (in response to the Academy of Corsica’s 1751 essay contest
considering the virtues of a hero) he is said to have replied: “A torche-cul [ass-
wipe] like that is not worth the trouble” (quoted in Damrosch 2005, 235).
F6183.indb 229F6183.indb 229 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
230 Notes to pages 27–29
41. Th is phrase comes from the “Preface to a Second Letter to Bordes,” a
response to Charles Bordes’s August 1753 “Second Discourse on the Benefi ts of
the Sciences and Arts.” Rousseau neither fi nished the letter nor published it. In
the same draft, Rousseau concluded that the question of the First Discourse was
only a corollary of this larger System (CW 2:184).
42. He wrote in the closing paragraph of his Letter to Raynal, “I know in ad-
vance the great words that will be used to attack me: enlightenment, knowledge,
laws, morality, reason, propriety, consideration, gentleness, amenity, politeness,
education, etc. To all that I will reply only with two other words, which ring
even more loudly in my ear. Virtue, truth, I will write for myself constantly;
Truth, virtue! If anyone perceived only words in this, I have nothing more to
say to him” (CW 2:27).
43. Th is observation is not unlike one made by Hannah Arendt (2005) about
those who are law-abiding for the sake of being law-abiding rather than in pur-
suit of the values that law tries to secure. She suggested that such people could
as easily be made to follow offi cially sanctioned rules for robbery and murder as
those that aimed to secure civil liberties.
44. Rousseau later described it as a “dangerous frankness” rooted in a cour-
age “caused by his independence” (CW 2:182).
45. Th e citations to the First Discourse here refer to Gay (1987) (and to Don-
ald A. Cress’s translation). Damrosch cites Trousson’s observation, “It would
take a book to list the books read by this man [Rousseau] who despised books”
(2005, 242).
46. Although a staunch egalitarian in his aspirations and designs for political,
social, and economic life, Rousseau thought people were radically unequal when it
came to questions of talents and natural abilities. On a separate note, being with-
out formal education and living largely unrewarded were both indexes that Rous-
seau, at this point in his life, shared with these men he singled out. Although he
famously recounted his early sentimental education on the workbench alongside
his dad, and briefl y with a formal tutor, most of his education was self-education,
but for brief spells of intense mentorship and intellectual exchange with highly
educated men and women. For an account of this, see Cranston (1982).
47. In his Letter to D’Alembert he wrote, “Th is is an error which could
easily be corrected if it were remembered that most of the literary men who
shine in Paris and most of the useful discoveries and new inventions come from
these despised provinces. Stay some time in a little town where you had at fi rst
believed you would fi nd only automatons; not only will you soon see there men
a great deal more sensible than your big-city monkeys, but you will rarely fail
to discover in obscurity there some ingenious man who will surprise you by his
talents and his works, who you will surprise even more in admiring them, and
F6183.indb 230F6183.indb 230 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
Notes to pages 29–31 231
who, in showing you prodigies of work, patience, and industry, will think he is
showing you only what is ordinary at Paris. Such is the simplicity of true genius.
It is neither scheming nor busybodyish; it knows not the path of honors and
fortune nor dreams of seeking it; it compares itself to no one . . . indiff erent to
insult and hardly conscious of praise” (Rousseau 1960, 60). He goes on to say
that one fi nds more original spirits in little towns than in capital cities because
people are less imitative; with fewer models, they draw more from themselves,
undeterred by the weight of the opinions of others.
48. For further discussion of this point, see Kenneth Knies (2006).
49. If Friedrich Nietzsche had had access to complete editions of Rousseau’s
writings rather than summaries of them in encyclopedias, phrases like these
might have counteracted the disdain he otherwise felt for his predecessor’s ro-
mantic sentimentalism. Rousseau’s depiction of decadent societies as those in
which men skillfully slander rather than brusquely confronting their adversar-
ies, his central use of pre-Christian examples of political life, and his description
of how language and music decay might also have been seen to invite and fore-
shadow Nietzsche’s own genealogy, distinction between aristocratic and slave
moralities, and Birth of Tragedy.
50. In his “Final Reply” Rousseau acknowledged a succinct formulation of-
fered by one of his critics as an accurate characterization of his position: “Th e
progress of letters is always proportional to the greatness of Empires” (CW 2:116),
however, he distinguished “morals and virtues” from “success and greatness.”
51. Th ese less hubristic nations had their counterparts in unique individu-
als living within more corrupt places, among them Socrates and Cato the El-
der, who resisted the vicious allures of their contemporaries. Socrates, unlike
the many artists of his day who mistook a particular specialized knowledge for
wisdom, knew the limits of his own understanding. Rousseau suggests that if
reborn in eighteenth-century France, Socrates would hold most men of arts
and sciences in contempt and would not “aid in the enlargement of the mass
of books that inundates us from every quarter. Instead he would leave only the
example and memory of his virtue” (1987, 10). (Rousseau suggests that Socrates
speaks in praise of ignorance. It would be more accurate to say that he treats
being aware of the limits of what one knows as a necessary starting point for
learning, understanding, or truthful rediscovery. One might also add that it is
a real question whether we would have “memories” of Socrates’s noble actions
if his student and disciple, Plato, had not so skillfully committed them to writ-
ing. Damrosch notes that both Rousseau and Diderot envisaged themselves in
the role of a Socrates, as martyrs for the cause of truth.) If spared the hemlock,
he would have been given a cup far more bitter: one of ridicule and scorn “a
hundred times worse than death” (ibid.).
F6183.indb 231F6183.indb 231 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
232 Notes to pages 32–34
52. Cranston (1982) suggests that Diderot and D’Alembert were able to over-
look the anti-Enlightenment position of the First Discourse because of its other
dimensions, in particular its paganism and silence on questions of Christianity.
Th is quotation is the primary example of the former.
53. Rousseau frequently used the metaphor of the veil which was also a cen-
tral trope in the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, who associated veiled life with
the consciousness of black people in an antiblack society, and was a more literal
concern of Fanon in his writings on the hostile interactions between colonial
offi cers and veiled Algerian women. John Rawls also chose the veil as the center-
piece of his twentieth century updating of the social contract device.
54. Rousseau emphasizes: “I am very far from thinking that this ascendancy
of women is itself an evil. It is a gift bestowed on them by nature for the hap-
piness of mankind. Better directed, it could produce as much good as it today
does harm. We are not suffi ciently aware of the advantages that would come to
pass in society if a better education were given to that half of mankind which
governs the other. Men will always be what is pleasing to women. Th us if you
want men to become great and virtuous, teach women what greatness of soul
and virtue are” (1987, 13n28). Th is passage is remarkably similar to several in
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, especially the con-
clusion of “On National Education.”
55. Polish King Stanislaus asked whether Rousseau was not praising as valor
and courage what was in fact ferocity and cruelty, audacious men with violent
passions followed by troops of slaves who left only ruin in their wake? Rousseau
did later withdraw his praise of military qualities, stating that he only admired
battles undertaken in defense of liberty not those of conquest and conceded
that soldiers were less praiseworthy than hunters, shepherds, and laborers, even
if he did still admire the citizen-soldiers in the writing of Machiavelli. While
being a soldier should not be made into a profession, he suggested, “to die in
the service of one’s fatherland is too noble a task to be confi ned to mercenaries”
(CW 2:118).
56. In such times, it is preferred that one distinguishes oneself through “bab-
ble” than by knowing how to act or think (CW 2:192). Rousseau suggests that
far better is to resemble a sheep than a fallen angel (CW 2:115).
57. Th e kernel of this thesis, developed in the Second Discourse, can be found
in Rousseau’s “Final Reply” where he wrote: “Before those dreadful words thine
and mine were invented, before there were any of that cruel and brutal species
of man called masters and of that other species of roguish and lying men called
slaves; before there were men abominable enough to dare have superfl uities
while other men die of hunger; before mutual dependence forced them all to
become imposters, jealous, and traitors; I very much wish someone would ex-
F6183.indb 232F6183.indb 232 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
Notes to pages 34–39 233
plain to me what those vices, those crimes could have been with which they are
reproached so emphatically” (CW 2:117; italics in the original).
58. Simply because of their scale, empires do tend to standardize education
systems and intellectual rewards—the primary example Rousseau off ers is of
the China of his day—with the consequence that the vast majority of students
seek not only to be successful, but also able to describe themselves as brilliant
or clever.
59. He too, in the tradition of the reluctant prophet who speaks with il-
luminating honesty precisely because an exile, told of a danger in the hope of
forestalling its most disastrous consequences but also suggested that perhaps the
damage was in fact already done.
60. Much like Hobbes, Rousseau says that to study men, he closed his
books, listened to what they said and then watched how they acted. Rousseau
suggested that his critics came to very diff erent conclusions because they had
remained in their studies, between book covers.
61. Th e epigraph comes from Ovid’s Tristia, Book V, x. 37.
62. After Rousseau’s Emile and Social Contract were condemned in Geneva,
he deleted “citizen of Geneva” from new works and new editions of older writ-
ings. Before that, however, he had been reinstated in the religion of his fathers
and regained his legal status when traveling back to Geneva with his friend
Gauff ecourt. At that time, he was spared the more public, humiliating, and
punitive dimensions of the process of reconversion, having only to be inter-
rogated by a council delighted to have won such a celebrated fi gure for the
Reformation.
63. Th is is a repeated theme in Rousseau’s work, much like the passage in
the Emile when a rich man replies to the question of where he lives, “I am one
of the rich.” Th e implication is that his home is anywhere his money will carry
him, his country any with room for his strong box.
64. One might consider C. L. R. James’ (1989) depiction of Jean-Jacques
Dessalines versus Toussaint L’Ouverture on this point. He suggested that the
former had little to lose and was generally less friendly to white people while the
latter saw a bit less precisely because he was more “enlightened.”
65. Th is is from Rousseau’s “Final Reply,” which was published in Mercure
in April 1752. It did not prove to be his fi nal word in the debate over his First
Discourse.
66. In response to Gautier’s claim that Rousseau’s arguments lacked his-
torical evidence—that it was not true that more primitive men had been more
virtuous or that there had been a golden age in historical time—Rousseau sug-
gested he had been misunderstood. He was, in fact, off ering “a genealogy,”
a philosophical and speculative anthropology or philosophy of history (CW
F6183.indb 233F6183.indb 233 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
234 Notes to pages 39–42
2:190). Th is was a theoretical rather than practical exploration, a general thesis
rather than a tracing of a particular set of events (OC 3:31–32). It was one in
which the golden age functioned as a philosophical abstraction, indispensable
to clarifying the meaning of human well-being. In his “Final Reply” he stated:
“I am assured that people have long since been disabused of the chimera of the
Golden Age. Why not add that people have long since been disabused of the
chimera of virtue?” (CW 2:117).
67. In an earlier exchange, Rousseau had challenged the assumption of his
critics that the mere fact of Europeans being unable to “penetrate” Africa and
thereby know what happened there was proof that it was full of vice. He sug-
gested that vices would have been there precisely if Europeans had found a way
to enter, that they would have introduced them along with themselves (CW
2:124–25). He writes, “If I were the leader of one of the peoples of Niger, I
declare that I would hang without pardon the fi rst European who would dare
enter it, and the fi rst Citizen who would try to leave” (CW 2:125).
68. Later in a note in his “Preface to Narcissus,” he wrote, “When I said
that our morals were corrupted, by that I did not claim to say that those of our
ancestors were good, but only that ours were even worse” (CW 2:190n).
69. Rousseau here says about arts and sciences what sounds much like
what his critics had said about the role and function of politeness in complex
societies.
70. When asked why he would rail against the value of arts and sciences, of
eloquence, rhetoric, and the written word while so clearly engaged with them
(in both the Discourse and previous musical and theatrical works), he off ered
three replies: First, he too had once been taken in by the allure of the prejudices
of the century (CW 2:188). Admiring such endeavors, he sought to see what
he too might achieve, having no idea of their dangers. Once having grasped
their vacuity, however, he looked at his own prior works as the “amusements of
[his] youth . . . [as] illegitimate children whom one still caresses with pleasure
while blushing to be their father” (CW 2:189). At this point, his weakness was
of another kind, one characteristic of so many other men: of being led astray
by passions from one’s principles. But fi nally, even then, in an already fallen
world, one could do creative work if one maintained the proper attitude toward
it. Rousseau suggested: “Th us I advise those who are so eager to seek reproaches
to make to me, to study my principles better and to observe my conduct better
before they accuse me of inconsistency in them. If they ever perceive that I am
beginning to court the favor of the public, or that I become vain from having
written pretty songs, or that I blush at having written bad Plays, or that I seek
to damage the glory of my rivals, or that I pretend to speak ill of the great men
of my century in order to try to raise myself to their level by lowering them to
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Notes to pages 42–47 235
mine, or that I aspire to a position in an Academy, or that I go to pay court to
the women who set the tone, or that I fl atter the stupidity of the Great, or that
ceasing to wish to live from the labor of my hands, I hold in ignominy the trade
that I have chosen and take steps toward wealth, in a word if they notice that
the love of reputation makes me forget that of virtue, I beg them to warn me
about it, and even publicly, and I promise them instantly to throw my Writings
and my Nooks into the fi re, and to concede all the errors with which they will
be pleased to reproach me” (CW 2:197).
71. Th is is from Book VIII of Th e Confessions. Th e passage can be found in
the 1959 Oeuvres complètes on page 388.
72. Rousseau compared domesticated men and animals, pointing both to
the relative health of “savages” versus “modern men” documented by travelers
and suggesting that “nature” closely resembled the treatment in Sparta of the
children of citizens—it strengthened the already robust, he claimed, and left
others to perish.
73. Th is argument again foreshadows Nietzsche.
74. Rousseau here anticipated Sigmund Freud’s observation: “Th e liberty
of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any
civilization.”
75. Rousseau observed that in situations in which the aim is to get ahead at
all costs and where doing so is zero-sum, there “is perhaps no rich man whose
death is not secretly desired by his greedy heirs, often indeed by his own chil-
dren; there is no shop at sea of which the sinking would not be good news for
some merchant; not a business house that a dishonorable debtor would not
happily see burned down with all the papers in it; no community that does not
relish the disasters of its neighbors” (OC 3:202).
76. Rousseau comments later in the text, “Since the poor had nothing to
lose but their liberty, it would have been utter folly for them to have voluntarily
surrendered the only good remaining to them, gaining nothing in return. On
the contrary, since the rich men were, so to speak, sensitive in all parts of their
goods, it was much easier to do them harm, and consequently they had to take
greater precautions to protect themselves” (1987, 71).
77. Wokler (2001) writes that Friedrich Engels described Rousseau’s Second
Discourse as a dialectical interpretation of history that foreshadowed that of
Marx. Marx, who read Rousseau through Hegel, instead saw him as a theo-
rist of abstract natural rights realized in the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the
French Revolution. Wokler thinks he would have had to conclude otherwise if
he had read the second part of the Second Discourse more closely, “Never again,”
comments Wokler, “was Rousseau so Marxist in his interpretation of society”
(2001, 68).
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236 Notes to pages 48–54
78. For a more elaborated discussion of theorizing culture and the impact of
doing so on understanding the concept of the human being, see Cliff ord Geertz
(1973), Parts I and II. Geertz does not engage Rousseau explicitly there, though
he does in “Th e Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss” in the
same volume. For a discussion of the limitations of the ways in which political
scientists have used the work of Geertz, see Lisa Wedeen (2002).
79. Or as Anne Norton puts it, “Is nothing outside culture? Th e answer . . .
is: no, there is nothing outside of culture for us. Nothing we study is outside
culture. Th e enterprise of studying it would bring it within culture, if it were
not already there” (2004a, 5).
80. Th is was another instance in which Voltaire and Rousseau took rather
diff erent stances: In Voltaire’s Th e Ingenu (1767), the prized insights of the Na-
tive American character are ultimately traceable back to European infl uence.
Dobie comments, “By domesticating his savage protagonist, by depicting him
as more Frenchman than Huron, Voltaire implies that the encounter with cul-
tural alterity was not a necessary preliminary to the formulation of cultural cri-
tique. Th is move makes it possible to view the critique of laws and conventions
from the standpoint of nature as a homegrown, European tradition rather than
as a phenomenon born of the encounter between peoples” (2010, 182).
81. No other work was more cited in the Second Discourse than Buff on’s.
Wokler (2001, 58) explains that Rousseau’s text was conceived as a set of conjec-
tures in terms of human and civil history similar to those Buff on off ered for the
origins of the earth and the birth, growth, and decay of animals.
82. Euben emphasizes that the circulation of big ideas of extraordinary
thinkers “rarely brings alive . . . those theoretical moments that erupt erratically
in ordinary lives, those less than grand encounters with what is strange and
estranging . . . in which quite ordinary people willingly and unwillingly run up
against the disorienting friction between what they think they know and what
they do not yet know, and the openings and closures this sometimes explosive
tension produces” (2008, 12). She emphasizes that such journeys—which could
involve crossing the street or an actual encounter with the past—do not for-
mulaically produce enlightenment. Whether or not they do is an unpredictable
consequence of a set of personal, historical, political, and institutional factors
that together shape an attitude or disposition.
83. Against Aristotle, Rousseau asserted that if there are slaves by nature it is
“because there have been slaves contrary to nature” (1994, 133). In other words,
although Rousseau acknowledged that many people’s ability to resist was com-
promised by their experiences of enslavement, he insisted with what Frederick
Douglass later explored more fully, that to make human beings slaves requires
ongoing, brutal reinforcement, precisely because such relations are not a refl ec-
tion of the unequal natures of masters or their slaves.
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Notes to pages 54–58 237
84. Sankar Muthu (2003) and Madeleine Dobie (2010, 170) have also made
this point.
85. Unlike public festivals, in which members of a community could eq-
uitably gather as both active participants and spectators, the theater was a se-
questered space that made corruption interesting and goodness banal. Here
Rousseau considered a concern that Simone Weil explored two centuries later
(in “Morality and Literature” published in the 1985 reader with her name): the
achievement of goodness does not make for the interesting storytelling that
wickedness does. Additionally of concern to Rousseau, theaters were costly to
build and maintain and required that one retain a class of actors who, as So-
crates had feared, spent their lives simulating the characters of anyone or any-
thing that was necessary. In so doing, they familiarized themselves with the
internal lives that made antipolitical and anticivic behavior thinkable. But per-
haps most signifi cantly again, actors would form their own discrete class and
class interests, sustained by the profi ts of idle and divisive luxury.
86. Rousseau wrote, “Th e taste for philosophy loosens in us all the bonds
of esteem and benevolence that attach men to society, and this is perhaps the
most dangerous of ills engendered by it. Th e charm of study soon renders any
other attachment insipid. Further, by dint of refl ecting on humanity, by dint
of observing men, the Philosopher learns to appreciate them according to their
worth, and it is diffi cult to have very much aff ection for what one holds in
contempt. Soon he concentrates into his person all the interest that virtuous
men share with their fellows: his contempt for others turns to the profi t of his
pride: his amour-propre increases in the same proportion as his indiff erence
to the rest of the universe. For him, family, fatherland, become words void of
meaning; he is neither parent, nor citizen, nor man; he is philosopher” (CW
2:192).
87. Rousseau yearns for simpler times when it was the beauty of the natural
world that was arresting and we lived before it and its gods in humble, largely
undiff erentiated equality. We move from this to wishing not to be observed
and answerable to forces greater than ourselves and in acts of self-deifi cation,
we nurture diff erences that emphasize not what will sustain a healthy commu-
nity, but that which makes us individually distinct in ways that are necessarily
zero-sum.
88. For further exploration of how groups were made into anthropology’s
objects through temporal displacement or through constructing them as re-
maining in and occupying a time diff erent from the contemporary one of their
observers, see Johannes Fabian (1983).
89. Th is was an answer to another of the Academy of Dijon’s essay contest
questions, in this case, one announced in the autumn of 1753. It might be said
that losing was largely Rousseau’s own fault: in submitting a hundred-page-long
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238 Notes to page 58
text, he completely ignored the length limit for submissions to the Academy of
Dijon. At the same time, the content of the winning essay, one that argued that
original sin was the cause of inequalities among men, suggests a mood among
judges that was unlikely to be amenable to Rousseau’s arguments. In truth, al-
ready famous and infamous, Rousseau did not need the Academy’s imprimatur
this time round. He received permission to publish the work in France by its
censors and it was prepared by a lead publisher of French books in Europe, a
fellow Genevan, named Marc-Michel Rey. Trained in Lausanne and then set-
tling in Amsterdam, Rey had a network through whom to smuggle books that
French authorities did not like. He became a close and tolerant friend of Rous-
seau’s, putting up with his meticulous fussing over every stage of the publica-
tion process and eventually making Rousseau his child’s godfather. For further
discussion, see Damrosch (2005, 250–51).
90. As Cranston has noted, this was not a discourse that could appeal to
conservatives since it was “as merciless to tradition as to modern culture” (1991,
306). Several critics charged Rousseau as writing primarily with envy and re-
sentment, with Voltaire famously sending Rousseau a sarcastic note of thanks
“for his new book against the human race” (CW 3:102). In a pamphlet Vol-
taire ridiculed Rousseau more extensively, putting the following words in his
imagined mouth: “It is dreadful to live in cities where one can carry a golden
means of measuring time in one’s pocket, where silkworms are brought from
China to cover one with their own down, and where one can hear a hundred
instruments in harmony that enchant ears and soothe the soul in sweet re-
pose. All of this is horrible, and it is clear that the Iroquois are the only good
people; but they had better stay far away from Quebec, where I suspect the
damnable sciences of Europe have been introduced” (Damrosch 2005, 241).
Dobie observes that Voltaire wrongly assumed that Rousseau, when speaking
of “savages” spoke of the Huron and Iroqouis, who were the focus of most of
his French contemporaries. Focusing on New France, she argues, made it easier
to avoid problematic features of slavery and miscegenation that emerged in
the Caribbean after about the 1720s. Instead, Rousseau focused exactly here,
on the Caribbean and Spanish Americas (Dobie 2010, 171). Voltaire was one
of the few writers living in Paris who had managed to amass great wealth and
he did not much like Rousseau’s depiction of the rich as having an unquench-
able taste for dominating others (Damrosch 2005, 241) Voltaire wrote in the
margins of his copy of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, “Voila the philosophy of
a beggar who would like to see the rich robbed by the poor.” Th is was a radi-
cal overstatement. While it was true that Rousseau had been an apprentice
and a lackey and had seen his father exiled from Geneva through quarreling
with a patrician, and that he often spoke and wrote in highly critical terms
F6183.indb 238F6183.indb 238 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
Notes to pages 58–64 239
about the character of people who could deliberately acquire wealth and of
the hidden injustices of those of rank and power, he did not advocate forcibly
redistributing wealth in pursuit of absolute economic equality. What is more,
he was quite at home with the old nobility of Paris who despised the alliance
of riches and royal absolutism that dominated the kingdom. In fact the titles
of this aristocracy were empty privileges without power; they were superior in
social rank while inferior in political importance, dreaming of a dead France of
chivalry and noble feudal lords protecting their people. For further discussion,
see Cranston (1991, 308–9).
91. In addition, in late colonial Saint Domingue where opera was very pop-
ular, performances of Rousseau’s “Le Devin du village” were advertised thirteen
times between 1764 and 1790. Th is continued into independence with the music
for Emperor Dessalines’s coronation being drawn from the opera. An annotated
and illustrated edition of the eighteenth-century Creole version of the opera,
Jeannot et Th érèse, is currently being prepared by Laurent Dubois, Deborah Jen-
son, musicologist Bernard Camier, and artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. See Sasha
Frere-Jones (2009) and Laurent Du Bois and Bernard Camier (2007).
92. For Rousseau scholars, the parallels between his relationship to his chil-
dren and to the social scientifi c areas (and Revolution) to which he is ascribed
the role of progenitor are no doubt striking: Much has been made of the sup-
posed hypocrisy of the man who wrote in such sentimental terms about ideal
practices of child-raising taking his own fi ve off spring to the foundling home.
At the same time, as Wokler has emphasized, even then his advocacy of the
practice of prolonged breast-feeding is thought to have saved the lives of a con-
siderable number of children.
2. decolonizing disciplinary methods
1. Fanon (1967b, 137).
2. Fanon does not cite Rousseau here or elsewhere. My argument is not
that Fanon made a deliberate project of taking up and reworking the insights
of Rousseau. Instead, the claim is that the problems of interest to both think-
ers necessitated engaging a particular range of themes and questions and that
it is fruitful to see how Fanon’s formulations expand Rousseau’s earlier related
endeavors.
3. Patrick Ehlen notes that Fanon in general did not have an easy time feel-
ing welcome, especially since even when people acted solicitously toward him,
it tended to be for the wrong reasons. “In every encounter,” Ehlen writes, “he
found himself ‘tucked away’ by others, reduced to some pocketable description”
(2001, 88) which Fanon experienced as an amputation, excision, or hemorrhage
(BSWM, 112–13).
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240 Notes to pages 64–66
4. He writes, “If there can be no discussion on a philosophical level . . . I am
willing to work on the psychoanalytical level—in other words, the level of the
‘failures,’ in the sense in which one speaks of engine failures” (BSWM, 23).
5. Even then, as Lewis Gordon has explored in chapter 2 in Existentia Af-
ricana, there is much greater willingness to see black writers and speakers as
sources of experience than of ideas or thought.
6. Fanon might have been more easily located had he allied with the “cul-
turalists,” including the Négritude writers linked to Présence Africaine, however,
unlike them he saw cultures as points of reference and conduits that could radi-
cally alter one another rather than as distinct cultural spirits or mentalities.
7. In so doing, Rousseau muddied his own claims to hypothetical and ex-
planatory rather than historical reasoning, to the state of nature as a regulative
ideal that may never have been and was certainly gone.
8. Ehlen wrote of Fanon’s decision to leave Paris for Lyon, that he might have
made an easier choice, that he could have moved easily into an existing category,
however distorted, “in exchange for a false air of belonging. But perhaps, for Fanon,
it was exactly this false acceptance that would be the most unbearable” (2001, 87).
9. Th ose who speak pidgin to a man of color see nothing wrong in what
they do because, Fanon writes, they have never been made to stop and think. If,
however, a man were to respond, “I am in no sense your boy . . . it is something
new under the sun” (BSWM, 33–34).
10. Fanon quotes from George Mounin who said of himself that “he gained
the possibility of always being natural with a Negro—and [of ] never, in his
presence, [falling] stupidly and imperceptibly into that attitude of the ethno-
graphic investigator that is still too often our unbearable manner of putting them
in their place” (BSWM, 199).
11. An example to which Fanon frequently returned was the grinning black
man, “showing all his teeth in a smile made for us always means a gift, service
with a smile, every time” (BSWM, 49n7).
12. In popular depictions of black people, it is always “yassuh-boss” and
physical displays that are “all nigger, walking backwards [and] shaking at the
slightest sign of irritation on the part of a petty offi cer” and ultimately being
killed (BSWM, 34). Fanon asks why in a democratic France with sixty million
citizens of color and with the need to dub US fi lms, these North American
stupidities are replicated without alteration. Th e response he says, “It is because
the Negro has to be shown in a certain way” (ibid.).
13. Th is erasure of the colonized person as an independent, human point of
view is captured in the Creole saying, “Zié békés brilé zié nèg” (“the eyes of the
beke burned the eyes of the negro”).
14. Fanon remarked that in the colonial context, while the slave sought to
be like the master, the master did not seek recognition but work from the slave.
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Notes to pages 66–68 241
Edward Said writes, “Despite its bitterness and violence, the whole point of
Fanon’s work is to force the European metropole to think its history together
with the history of the colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abased
immobility of imperial domination” (1989, 223–25).
15. Fanon cites G. Legman who wrote that, with rare exceptions, every
American child who was six years old in 1938 had seen at the very least eighteen
thousand scenes of ferocious violence. He commented, “Except the Boers, the
Americans are the only modern nation that within living memory has com-
pletely driven the autochthonous population off the soil that it occupied.”
Fanon adds that the Caribs (to whom Rousseau referred) experienced the same
fate at the hands of French and Spanish explorers (BSWM, 146–47).
16. Fanon adds that he would like nothing more than the creation of chil-
dren’s magazines, songs, and history texts written especially for black children.
17. Fanon describes Senegalese who learn Creole in the hope of passing for
an Antillean. His assessment? “I call this alienation” (BSWM, 38), a larger phe-
nomenon magnifi ed through the study of language.
18. Fanon emphasizes that a similar phenomenon goes on in the internal
periphery of France, that those from Lyons fi rst visiting Paris boast constantly
of their home and of “all that fascinates people who have nothing to do.” When
returning home, however, the same people cannot stop talking about Paris. It
is to “know Paris and die” (BSWM, 19). Within Martinique, the same is true of
smaller places in relationship to Fort-de-France and then of Martinique and the
world beyond. Imprisoned on the island without outlets, stranded, Europe is
“breathed in like pure air” (BSWM, 21–22).
19. In Antilles, as Fanon emphasizes in Brittany (BSWM, 28), there is a dia-
lect and then there is the French language. Th e diff erence, Fanon emphasizes,
is that Bretons do not see themselves as inferior to or as having been civilized
by the white man.
20. Fanon describes such women as describing it as illogical for a mulatto
woman to accept a Negro husband since “it is a question of saving the race”
(BSWM, 54–55; a remarkably illogical statement since “saving the race” means
trying to dilute it to the point of its no longer being visibly distinct or recog-
nizable as such) and expecting apologies from (and in some instances making
formal charges against) black men who dared to off er their love to a whiter soul.
Sadly, all of the eff orts of such women are directed at what they will never at-
tain: to be the bride of a white man from Europe. Fanon recounts the similar
desire of Jean Veneuse, the black abandonment neurotic, to be acknowledged
and loved as a white man through the love of a white woman. Th e framing of
the road to total realization as one of “marrying white culture, beauty, white
whiteness” (63), was observed by Louis-T. Achille who, in a report to the Inter-
racial Conference of 1949, stated that people marry in another race what would
F6183.indb 241F6183.indb 241 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
242 Notes to pages 68–72
be beneath them within their own because these other considerations are over-
ridden by access to that illustrious race and its wiping out in himself in his own
mind of the color prejudice from which he has suff ered for so long (71–72).
21. Fanon wrote, “Th e patriarchal European family with its fl aws, failures,
and vices is closely linked to a society we know and produces about 30 neu-
rotics—the problem is to create with the help of psychoanalytical, sociological,
political lessons, a new family environment capable of reducing, if not elimi-
nating, the proportion of waste, in the asocial sense of the word” (BSWM,
48–49).
22. On this point, consider Lewis R. Gordon’s (2008c) An Introduction to
Africana Philosophy, which considers questions of philosophical anthropology
(“in reality, who [and what] am I?”) as one of three defi ning tropes of this tradi-
tion of thought.
23. Th e ongoing expectation is that while the Negro is savage, the student is
civilized. While there may be others within the university who do not think in
such ways, “beyond its walls,” writes Fanon, “is an army of fools,” who are “the
product of a psychological-economic system” (BSWM, 35).
24. Simone de Beauvoir describes a remarkably similar phenomenon in
Th e Second Sex’s discussion of professional women. See chapter 25, especially
page 701.
25. Like Rousseau, Fanon, when returning home, would not stay long or
ultimately return. He found it more diffi cult to relate to local people’s con-
cerns and his own manner was less like the island’s bourgeoisie than that of the
French intellectuals of his day (Ehlen 2001).
26. Th is is to be, as Lewis Gordon has described it, an experience without
experience or a human being supposedly without inner life (2000, chap. 2).
27. Given the constant suggestions that the Negro has no culture or civiliza-
tion or long historical past, it makes sense that many Negroes seek “to prove the
existence of a black civilization to the white world at all costs” (BSWM, 34). Still,
the view of any essential monopoly on particular forms of culture was highly
mistaken. Fanon wrote, “To ask a Negro of the Upper Niger to wear shoes, to say
of him that he will never be a Schubert, is no less ridiculous than to be surprised
that a worker in the Berliet truck factory does not spend his evenings studying
lyricism in Hindu literature or to say that he will never be an Einstein. Actually,
in an absolute sense, nothing stands in the way of such things. Nothing—except
that the people in question lack the opportunities” (95–96).
28. It is worth emphasizing that Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism (originally
Year Five of the Algerian Revolution) explicitly explored the relationship of cul-
tural change to revolutionary action and was banned in France six months after
its publication. By contrast, none of the work of the Négritude movement met
with such a fate (Macey 2002, 180). Fanon stated in BSWM, “In no way must I
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Notes to pages 72–80 243
derive my original vocation from the past of peoples of color. In no way must
I devote myself to resurrecting a negro civilization that has been unfairly mis-
recognized . . . I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and
my future. My black skin is not the repository of specifi c values” (184). Th is is
not, however, to suggest that he did not recognize the need, however ultimately
insuffi cient, of Négritude in struggles toward black subjective emancipation.
29. Fanon (BSWM, 172–73) wrote, “Analysis of the real is always diffi cult.
An investigator can choose between two attitudes toward his subject. First, he
can be satisfi ed only to describe, in the manner of those anatomists who are all
surprised when, in the midst of a description of the tibia, they are asked how
many fi bular depressions they have. Th at is because in their research there is
never a question of themselves but of others. In the beginning of my medical
studies, after several nauseating sessions in the dissecting room, I asked an older
hand how I could prevent such reactions. ‘My friend, pretend you’re dissecting
a cat, and everything will be alright.’ . . . Second, once he has described reality,
the investigator can make up his mind to change it. In principle, however, the
decision to describe seems naturally to imply a critical approach and therefore
a need to go farther toward some solution. Both authoritative and anecdotal
literature have created too many stories about Negroes to be suppressed. But
putting them all together does not help us in our real task, which is to disclose
their mechanics. What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but
to fi nd their meaning. . . . Th e question that arises is this: Can the white man
behave healthily toward the black man and can the black man behave healthily
toward the white man?”
30. Th is approach was as evident within Europe as in its periphery: varicose
veins evident on legs that stood too long were not blamed on their working
conditions but on a prior, if latent, genetic weaknesses.
31. Th e structure of this argument parallels that of another: “One cannot be
in favor of the maintenance of French domination in Algeria and opposed to
the means that this requires. Torture in Algeria is not an accident, or an error,
or a fault. Colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of tortur-
ing, of violating, or of massacring. Torture is an expression and a means of the
occupant-occupied relationship” (1967c, 66). In other words, the police agent
who tortures does not break the law, he acts within the framework of colonial
institutions, indeed manifesting “an exemplary loyalty to the system” (71).
32. It is in contrast that Fanon describes what he has tried to do: “In this
work I have made it a point to convey the misery of the black man. Physically
and aff ectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would be dishon-
est. It is not possible for me to be objective” (BSWM, 86).
33. Fanon continues, “When a bachelor in philosophy from the Antilles re-
fuses to apply for certifi cation as a teacher on the ground of his color, I say that
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244 Notes to pages 80–82
philosophy has never saved anyone; when someone tries to prove that black
men are as intelligent as white men, intelligence has never saved anyone. . . . If
philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they
have also been employed to justify the extermination of men” (BSWM, 28–29).
Th ere is nothing intrinsic to their valence or direction, they are not above the
political fray, even when used in the most well intentioned of ways.
34. Fanon’s brother, Joby, suggested that this was too modest a title.
35. Macey (2002, 155) comments that the book’s psychiatric and psychoana-
lytic content made it unacceptable to more literary publishers like Gallimard
while its politics would have made it anathema to any house close to the Parti
Communiste Français. Academic medical publishers would have objected to
the juxtaposition of clinical data, literary allusions, and personal refl ections. It is
most likely, Macey suggests, that he did not approach Présence Africaine because
he did not share the culturalist approach of many of the works it oversaw and he
did not want to be pigeonholed as a black writer.
36. Th e thesis that Fanon ultimately wrote also advanced an individualized,
cultural approach to psychotherapy that emphasized the importance of a pa-
tient’s worldview above any isolated mental process (Cherki 2006, 99). “Th e
task of the psychiatrist, then, becomes not simply to interview the patient and
then thumb through a book to uncover the diagnosis and solution, but to make
an eff ort to ‘reach’ the patient through the patient’s own symbols and belief sys-
tems. Rather than focusing on symptoms, the approach focuses on the patient,
or even beyond the patient” (99–100).
37. Although Macey reiterates that this characterization is not meant to be
insulting or diminishing, it is replete with just such language—from the “plun-
dering of libraries” at institutions in which Fanon was a student to going on to
describing him as crafting work to explore and analyze his own situation “even
though he had no real academic training as a philosopher and no extensive
knowledge of psychoanalysis.”
38. Fanon wrote, “Besides phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny. . . .
But society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human infl uences.
Man is what brings society into being” (BSWM, 11).
39. Fanon writes that all forms of racism show the same collapse, the same
bankruptcy of man (BSWM, 86). He describes this as having been made clear
to him by his philosophy professor who was a native of the Antilles. He had
said, “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is
talking about you.” Fanon clarifi es, “He meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is
inevitably anti-Negro” (122). It is not suffi cient to frame European civilization
and its best representatives as free of responsibility for colonial racism since it
was the adventurers and politicians who were responsible. Quoting from Jean-
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Notes to pages 82–84 245
son, Fanon states, “If you succeed in keeping yourselves unsullied, it is because
others dirty themselves in your place. You hire thugs, and, balancing the ac-
counts, it is you who are the real criminals: for without you, without your blind
indiff erence, such men could never carry out deeds that damn you as much as
they shame those men” (from Esprit, April 1950; Fanon BSWM, 92). Reject-
ing Mannoni’s claim that France was the least racialist-minded country in the
world, Fanon writes, “France is a racist country, for the myth of the bad nigger
is part of the collective unconscious” (BSWM, 92).
40. It is interesting that the third fi gure most would add to this list would
be Plato, whose writing aimed explicitly to capture the spirit of the dialogue. All
three men, at the level of the form of the text, embodied a particular orienta-
tion to how others should be engaged when one seeks to advance the space of
reason.
41. He wrote, “Walking is something that drives and fuels my thoughts: I
can hardly think when I stay in place, it is necessary that my body is in mo-
tion . . . the removal of everything that makes me feel my dependence, all that
reminds me of my situation . . . gives me more courage to think” (OC 1:162).
42. Cherki writes, with the exception perhaps of “Racism and Culture,”
all of Fanon’s writings, even if later revised, “began as spoken words, words
that were communicated to an interlocutor, preferably a close and trusted one”
(2006, 27).
43. Simone de Beauvoir described Fanon “with a razor sharp intelligence,
intensely alive, endowed with a grim sense of humor, he explained things, made
jokes, questioned us, gave imitations, told stories; everything he talked about
seemed alive again before our eyes” (quoted in Bulhan 1985, 31).
44. Both Sartre and Father Celeste commented that Fanon did not like part-
ners in conversation who were reticent; he wanted them to share what they
thought and why (Djemaï 2001).
45. Th is challenge, at times, appears momentous. Consider Fanon’s discus-
sion of the Negro with the agonizing conviction that he would never gain rec-
ognition from his white physician colleagues or patients who therefore enlists
in the army as a medical offi cer refusing to serve in the colonies or in a colonial
unit because he wants to have white men under his command, fearing and
respecting him. Fanon writes, “Th at was just what he wanted, what he strove
for: to make white men adopt a Negro attitude toward him. In this way he was
obtaining revenge for the imago that had always obsessed him: the frightened,
trembling Negro, abased before the white overlord” (BSWM, 61).
46. Fanon writes that he decided to accept his identifi cation by others with
enslaved and lynched ancestors. “It was on the universal level of the intellect
that I understood this inner kinship—I was the grandson of slaves in exactly
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246 Notes to pages 84–86
the same way in which President Lebrun was the grandson of tax-paying, hard-
working peasants” (BSWM, 113).
47. He argued that one had to investigate the extent to which the conclu-
sions of Freud or Adler could be applied to understand the man of color’s view
of the world (BSWM, 141).
48. He continued, “I owe it to myself to affi rm that the Arab, permanently
an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.”
49. Suspicion of this kind makes a good deal of sense if one considers the
ubiquity of abuses: from experiments done on patients to estimate pain thresh-
olds of distinct races; to selling water pills as penicillin and B12 tablets to fi ght
cancer; accepting money for what were said to be x-rays when behind the sheet,
no radiological equipment was present; and reporting on nationalists rather
than honoring codes of confi dentiality that pertained to them. For further dis-
cussion, see Bulhan (1985).
50. Bulhan (1985) explains that Algeria was a prized colony, not only for eco-
nomic and strategic reasons, but also because of the large and powerful settler
community there. Considered an integral part of France, expropriation of la-
bor and land followed soon after conquest. Countless Algerians were displaced
and forced into temporary tenancy—by 1890, four million acres of the best
land were in European hands while by 1940, about one-third of the profi tably
cultivatable land was owned by 2 percent of the population, mainly by Euro-
pean settlers. Not all of these were French, many were Southern Europeans of
varied nationalities. Bulhan writes, “Algeria became a new frontier where land
was grabbed without question and native labor exploited with impunity” (1985,
235). Much land was used for vineyards and to make Algeria an export enclave
for wine, which most Algerians did not drink. A small Algerian elite, opposed
by most European settlers, was manipulated with promises of reform and as-
similation that were largely dashed.
51. Fanon argued that such patients could not be happier in Europe than at
home but that repatriation was not the answer so long as social and economic
inequalities remained. A total social reconstruction was needed, “houses to be
built, schools to be opened, roads to be laid out, slums torn down, cities to
spring from the earth, men, women and children to be adorned with smiles.”
52. When Fanon returned to Martinique after defending his medical thesis
in 1951 he found that the source of the majority of problems he encountered
were political and economic, that most patients suff ered from nutritional needs,
lack of sanitation and health services on an island under colonial rule and “in
no mood for independence.” For the many who identifi ed strongly with France,
Fanon was a traitor (Bulhan 1985, 207). Bulhan describes Fanon’s search for an
appropriate context as a search for himself, for what to live and die for. Psychia-
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Notes to pages 86–87 247
try, Bulhan writes, promised a means for making a living and tool for correcting
what was amiss.
53. Fanon writes, “Whenever I have read a psychoanalytic work, discussed
problems with my professors or talked with European patients, I have been
struck by the disparity between the corresponding schemas and the reality that
the Negro presents” (BSWM, 150) He off ers by way of example that the black
person’s inferiority or superiority complex or feelings of equality are conscious
and present; he is without the aff ective amnesia typical of the average white
neurotic. In a separate discussion he also writes, “I believe it is necessary to be-
come a child again in order to grasp certain psychic realities. Th is is where Jung
was an innovator: He wanted to go back to the childhood of the world, but he
made a remarkable mistake: He went back only to the childhood of Europe”
(BSWM, 190).
54. Tosquelles was a pioneer in milieu therapy and the fi rst rigorously to ap-
ply in a hospital environment the ideas of therapeutic communities developed
in England and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
55. Fanon undertook this research and writing with Lacaton who, as the in-
tensity of the Algerian war increased, was arrested on suspicion of collaboration.
When standard interrogation procedures led nowhere, Lacaton was pushed and
punched around, submerged in a bathtub and subjected to enemas of soapy
water and electric shock to the genitals. He was eventually released in a man-
ner reserved for ambiguous personalities: while half-conscious, he was taken
to a European farm and dumped in a pigsty. He managed to escape only to
depart for France (Geismar 1971, 77; Bulhan 1985, 238). Fanon, for his part, was
initially protected somewhat by being a foreigner, by being neither Algerian
nor European and linked into an international community. When his body
was brought to Tunis, “in the middle of the war the Algerians paused to honor
one of their own in a national funeral” (from Simone de Beauvoir). He was
considered to be a citizen of the new Algerian nation. Th e Swiss journalist and
novelist François Bondy wrote in his 1966 “Th e Black Rousseau” New York Re-
view of Books article, “Fanon belonged to the cosmopolitan fringe—like ardent
foreigners who fought in Russian and Spanish revolutions—eager to give wide
international meaning to a specifi c struggle, always shaken off at some later
stage. Th e men who rule Algeria today would have little use for Fanon’s cease-
less exhortations; and the Algerian ‘masses’ would make a Martinican Negro
feel foreign in ways he would never have experienced in Paris. Th e prophet of
Algeria’s national revolution would have found himself an exile from his chosen
homeland, in search of another revolutionary war with which to identify him-
self. Che Guevara could have been at home practically anywhere in Hispanic
America, but Frantz Fanon would remain a stranger, even in Black Africa” (3).
F6183.indb 247F6183.indb 247 12/2/13 9:26:58 AM12/2/13 9:26:58 AM
248 Notes to pages 87–97
Bondy bases the supposed likeness of Rousseau and Fanon in his claim that
Fanon cares less for economic development than for brotherhood, democracy,
and new nationalism which Bondy suggests was also the doctrine of Rousseau
who advised Poles not to catch up to the West but become more distinctly Pol-
ish. If the aim was for Africa to become a new Europe, it would be better to
leave its destiny to Europeans who could achieve this aim better than the most
gifted of Africans. See Bondy (1966).
3. rousseau’s general will
1. Rousseau (1928, 630–31).
2. My claim does not extend to ancient polities that included a vast array of
legitimating practices from the problematics of the Greek city-state to Egyptian
and Mesopotamian cities to Chinese dynasties. To attempt to account for all of
these would certainly be beyond the scope of this discussion.
3. It was Aristotle’s claim that it is only gods and beasts that can live outside
of a polis. For the rest of us, the “we” to which I here refer, there is and must be
politics (Aristotle 2000, 61).
4. Rousseau is arguing here explicitly against Sir Robert Filmer’s (1680) Pa-
triarcha; or the Natural Power of Kings, which Rousseau felt had already received
more attention than it was due, particularly given that Aristotle had anticipated
and rejected its central arguments centuries before. Rousseau is not, however,
suggesting that political leadership is unnatural because it is uncaring.
5. Rousseau cautioned that comparisons of political with physical bodies
were inaccurate in many respects. Still they were useful to emphasize an alterna-
tive to the model for which Filmer urged. In the Discourse on Political Economy,
Rousseau elaborated: “Th e sovereign power represents the head; the laws and
customs are the brain, source of the nerves and seat of the understanding, the
will and the senses, of which the judges and magistrates are the organs; the com-
merce, industry and agriculture are the mouth and the stomach which prepare
the common subsistence; the public fi nances are the blood that is discharged
by a wise economy, performing the functions of the heart, in order to distribute
nourishment and life throughout the body; the citizens are the body and mem-
bers that make the machine move, live, and work, and that cannot be harmed
in any part without a painful impression immediately being transmitted to the
brain, if the animal is in a state of good health” (1987, 114). Citizens each are not
then independent parts of the whole. I cannot be the arm, with my own tasks
to do and strains to feel, separated from you who may be the ear or a strand
of hair. We are, instead, all both body and members, healthy when of a piece.
Rousseau notes that in politics, as with the body, there must be a common self
that simultaneously makes the parts one and living. Without this, both perish.
To be a moral being, the body politic requires a will. Th is is the general will.
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Notes to pages 97–102 249
6. Robert Wokler notes that Rousseau never refers to the sovereign people as
a democracy. Many writers quote Rousseau’s caution that democracy would be
appropriate for a people of gods . . . “but that so perfect a form of government is
not suited to men” (1987, 180). Wokler adds that Rousseau understood democ-
racy as a system of direct government rather than one of direct sovereignty and
feared that it would require that the majority of people execute public policy.
Th is did not only seem a logistical nightmare and an impossibility, it would
make corruption and civil war inevitable. See Robert Wokler (2001, 82).
7. In Tzvetan Todorov’s words Rousseau discovered and invented our mo-
dernity, “ ‘Discovered,’ because this modern society existed before he did, but it
had not yet found such a penetrating interpreter. But also ‘invented,’ because
he has passed down to posterity the concepts and themes that, for two hundred
years, we have not ceased to examine” (2001, 2).
8. It may be objected that in marriage one makes precisely this commit-
ment, a commitment to someone from whom one can demand everything.
Surely, however, there are certain kinds of demands that would compromise the
very meaning of what is involved in marriage.
9. Th is is an insight in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, a
work arguably heavily guided by the concept of the general will. Sartre distin-
guishes between “seriality” and a “group-in-fusion.” Th e former is a mere collec-
tion of people, as, for instance, in the case of random passengers on a bus; the
latter is what happens when they become aware of themselves as a unity, as, for
instance, in the case of a hijacker taking over the bus and thereby threatening
the lives of each of them, making all aware of their shared endangered reality.
For a discussion of these Sartrean concepts, see William L. McBride (1991) and
Iris M. Young (1994).
10. Pufendorf had suggested that in the creation of the state, each person
promised to submit his particular will to the will of one person or an assembly
of people so that his decisions would be deemed the positive will of everyone in
general and in particular. Burlamaqui argued that a union of will created civil
society which in turn required a “supreme power to intimidate” anyone who
dared act against the common utility. Th e resolutions of the intimidators were
considered “the positive will of all in general, and of each in particular.” See
Rosenblatt (1997, 188).
11. Th ere is therefore, for a particular brand of Rousseauian, a strange irony
at the core of antipolitical nostalgia for or idealization of the state of nature: To
refl ect in this way is to make use of capacities that only emerge out of shared
life, out of a curtailing of the right to everything that one is tempted to try to
acquire in a way that is only limited by one’s force and that of others. Intelligent
life, in which we are capable of collective willing, emerges with refl ection and
an ability to think retrospectively. Th ese are all fruits of a social world, a world
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250 Notes to pages 102–4
through which we do not move isolated and alone, but with other human be-
ings who we must consider and who consider us. Th eir lives and our own inter-
twine. Tzvetan Todorov puts it this way: “Even from an egoistic point of view,
the ‘other’ is indispensable. Society, then, is not a lesser evil, a supplement; it is
the source of qualities that do not exist without it” (2001, 58).
12. Graeme Garrard (2003) has argued that Rousseau, against the philosophes,
insisted that “sentiments of sociability” needed to be artifi cially produced and
sustained through institutions and social norms. He saw both social cohesion
and the strength of communities as fragile. Th ey in turn saw his insistence on
the sacrifi ces required to sustain a precarious social life as unnecessarily austere.
Diderot, for instance, argued in his Encyclopédie entry on “natural right” that
human beings formed natural societies with their own general wills before the
formation of political societies. Th ese were evident to anyone who made use of
their reason. Th ose who could not were unnatural beings undeserving of their
rights as men.
13. Th is is suggested in passages that state that while the general will is al-
ways right, a particular iteration of it might not be enlightened; that all that is
just comes from G-d (Rousseau 1987, 160); or that the voice of the sovereign
people is, in eff ect, the voice of G-d (115).
14. John Noone writes, “Th e distinction between a person’s actual will and
his real will can be traced back at least to Plato. What an individual does or in-
tends is for the most part an index of his actual will. But if the unforeseen con-
sequences of an act are or would be disastrous, it is claimed that the actual will
was not the real will. It is on the basis of this distinction that forcible frustration
of an actual will is sometimes justifi ed: the man who is prevented from cross-
ing a bridge known to be unsafe, the thirst of a child whose mother snatches
a bottle of poison from him, the drunk who is not allowed to drive, and so
on. It would save a lot of analytical headaches if one could simply identify a
person’s general will as his real will. Unfortunately, this will not do, because
the distinction between actual and real cuts across both particular and general
wills” (1980, 74).
15. Brian Barry has outlined a set of conditions in which it is likely that
the majority would be right and in which one may be glad that one’s minority
opinion did not prevail. Th ese include: if there is a uniquely right answer that
is in conformity with the general will; if everyone has an equal opportunity to
discern the right answer; if everyone wants right to prevail. In such instances
the majority will is not the general will but is in conformity with it, with the
implication that this is not majoritarianism, the imposing of one limited pref-
erence and opinion on and over all others. Th is interpretation seeks to escape
such a relativism by framing our eff orts as a collective process to ascertain what
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Notes to pages 104–10 251
is correct. See Brian Barry (1967, 119–26). Th is is also the way through which
Rousseau’s general will has been read as Codorcetian. See Bernard Grofman and
Scott L. Feld (1988, 567–76).
16. John Charvet (1974, 44) has insisted that Rousseau does indeed seek the
elimination of individual diff erences and that this is clearest in his disdain for
factions. Charvet argues that the desire to break these up is unrealistic: we are
unable to eradicate the interests that make them coalesce. It is also undesirable,
for it requires individuals who relate to each other only as mirrors to themselves.
He depicts Rousseau’s political society as one in which there can only be the
individual, absolutely alone, and the all-embracing common life.
17. Th e legitimacy brought to law by the general will could also be compared
with H. L. A. Hart’s (1961) idea of the “rule of recognition” delineated in Th e
Concept of Law. He contends that every legal system has a set of second- order
understandings, arrangements, institutions, and rules through which legally
authoritative particular laws and authors of law can be recognized as such and
thereby come into being. Th is idea is a reformulation of the nineteenth-century
English legal philosopher John Austin’s theory of positive law through which he
insisted that law is a matter of historical decisions made by people who possess
political power and occupy the role of sovereign. Hart sought to frame law as
more than the formalization of command. His success is a matter of debate. For
a brief discussion of this, see Ronald Dworkin (1986, 33–35).
18. For a fascinating exploration of the relationship between illegitimacy
and living as an imitation, see Gary Schwartz (1997, 111–28). Schwartz con-
tends, here in the spirit of the discussion in Chapter 2, that in US society, black
girls are told that to be beautiful is to be white. Th ey thus face a predicament in
which attempting to be desirable requires trying to be what they are not.
19. Indeed, gone from this discussion are Rousseau’s earlier obsessions with
the destructive consequences of seeking public attention and acclaim.
20. See McCormick (2007; 2011).
21. Former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan was re-
cently asked why Africa was such a brutal place, why it was that the people of
its decolonized nations seemed better at butchering than governing each other.
His answer was poignant: He pointed out that the planes that hit the World
Trade Center on September 11, 2001, left many US citizens volunteering to give
up the institutions that could protect the civil rights that they once pointed to
as uniquely defi ning their nation. He asked the man with whom he was speak-
ing to imagine what hundreds of years of ongoing but magnifi ed September 11
attacks would do for the challenge of governing. He might have added that Eu-
rope is no stranger to human butchery, that it has quite a rich history, at home
and abroad, on this score.
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252 Notes to pages 112–14
22. Rousseau (1987, 155) insists, even then, that this is not the sign of a cor-
rupted people but of one that has been fooled into wishing for something that
could make the “they” of which they are a part disintegrate. Th eir deliberate de-
ception, it would seem, is normally the work of opportunistic individuals who
weigh on the naïve, innocent, and vulnerable within smaller, partial societies.
Knowing the currency of generality, they might mask their narrow ambitions
under its banner. Or they might speak to the wrong parts of us that are always
partial to what will further eat away at a public spirit already always under du-
ress. In both cases, the people mistake a narrower general will as comparable to,
indeed perhaps even preferable to, the more comprehensive one of the polity
as a whole with the outcome of either an unenlightened general will, one that
does not embody a skilled reconciliation of what is right with what is popularly
willed, or the will of all. Worth noting is that the idea of a less enlightened gen-
eral will suggests another implicit standard, another general will that functions
as a regulative ideal, that which could in principle be discernible to informed
members of the citizenry as a more perfect realization of the justice sought.
Laurence Cooper has argued that Rousseau endorses and condemns ways of life
based on a psychological standard: does it lack or promote psychic integrity?
Th ere are several implications, one of which is a concern with psychology over
behavior or with what one is or intends rather than with what one does. One
sees countless examples of this in the Confessions, including when Rousseau
accepts Madame’s indulgences but does not consider himself a rogue since he
would have preferred to have acted diff erently. Cooper argues that no moral
code is invulnerable to bad faith but that Rousseau’s may create even more space
with which to evade moral accountability. See Cooper (1999, 194, 206–7).
23. Rousseau does not here entertain a dilemma outlined by Richard Dag-
ger, drawing on Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, in which a city fi nds its
economic fortunes tied to the fate of a single industry that produces pollution
hazardous to its residents. Which concern, he asked, the loss of money and jobs
or increasing rates of severe birth deformities, should be the focus of the citizen?
See Dagger (1997, 96–97).
24. John T. Scott, following Jean Starobinski’s suggestion, argues that the
idea of unity ties together Rousseau’s aesthetic and political concerns with his
interest in communication, emphasizing the instrumental and metaphoric role
of music and language in the development of a harmonious community capable
of the aff ect necessary to act together. See Scott (1997, 803–29) and Starobinski
(1977, 195–210).
25. One might compare this with speech acts or those instances when, as
J. L. Austin observed, circumstances permit speaking and doing to become iden-
tical. In such cases, one speaks in a way that is neither description nor reporting,
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Notes to pages 114–16 253
saying words that are neither true nor false. One names a child, agrees to marry,
makes a bet, announces a shared beginning. If in appropriate circumstances,
usually those that meet conditions of an existing and accepted convention and
with the feelings and intentions required by sincerity, the act will be a speech
act, rather than a “misfi re.” See Austin (1979, 235).
26. Th ese were comments made following a summary of Abizadeh’s paper,
“Word versus the Public Th ing: Verbal Th reats to the Rousseauian Republic,”
American Political Science Association meeting held in Chicago, Septem-
ber 2–5, 2004.
27. Judith Shklar and more recently Steven Johnston have argued that Rous-
seau’s work is tragic. For Johnston, Rousseau’s political theory is “tucked within
the confi nes of a munifi cent ontology the critical feature of which is a presump-
tion of resolution: political projects can be conceived and executed according
to a plan, thus lacking any signifi cant unwanted features. Th e nature of things,
including the nature of human being, allows for it,” (1999, 13). With much of
the rest of the Western tradition of thought, Johnston suggests, alienation and
discord remain simply as a function of untruth of one kind or another. Th ese are
irredeemable, providential, ontological assumptions in Johnston’s view, that fail
to wrestle with the “lack of transcendental warrant for social and political prac-
tices and values” (16). He claims boldly, “To bring [these] out, then, is to force
Rousseau to be free” (ibid.). Shklar sees Rousseau seeking “a mechanical eva-
sion” of people’s limitations. She writes, “[No] one knew better than Rousseau
that moral self-injury cannot simply be undone. Moral and social errors are irre-
versible” (1969, 192). No one takes a diff erent position, closer to if not identical
with the one advanced here: Conceptual success may have required disembody-
ing the spirit of politics. He refl ects, “In one sense a purely conceptual analysis
of Rousseau’s approach to the problem of legitimacy is complete. If you view
his complicated argument from a high level of abstraction where all assump-
tions can be granted, I think you will fi nd that he has indeed conceptually solved
his problem. But this is hardly satisfactory. What we have is a disembodied
spirit; what we need to supply is some corporeal substance” (Johnston 1999, 87).
28. One of the many ingenious qualities of Rousseau’s writing is the way
in which it replicated in form what it is trying to convey in substance. In this
instance, the tumultuous read reenacts a fundamental feature of the political.
In Ellen Kennedy’s words, it “is the gateway into the substantive concerns that
constitute the seriousness of human life and are at times its affl iction and at
others the source of its grandeur.” She continues in a discussion of Carl Schmitt
in a way that is highly relevant here, “Whether the engagement [in the public]
is meaningful or the source of darkest nihilism will depend on precisely those
elements of the political beyond the system of needs. Th at in Carl Schmitt’s
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254 Notes to pages 116–35
time this venture ended in horror does not negate its necessity if we are to lead
human lives” (2004, 183).
29. One might object that Rousseau describes obeying the general will as
giving each citizen to his homeland, guaranteeing him against all personal de-
pendence “a condition that produces the skill and performance of the political
machine, and which alone bestows legitimacy upon civil commitments,” (Rous-
seau 1987, 150; italics added). Yet this is a metaphor Rousseau used sparingly and
even here the machine emerges out of virtuous action that limits dependence.
In other words, even in talking about a political machine, Rousseau emphasizes
that it is human agency and freedom that will bring this into being. Freedom
for him, particularly as manifested in virtuous action could counteract the id-
iosyncratic dependence on men which he wrote in Emile (1979) is “without
order.”
30. Both of these extremities are evident in the United States right now.
31. One might think here of the arguments of US black nationalists who
have suggested that rather than a unifi ed polity, the United States is a collection
of smaller unequal nations with an insuffi cient number of overlapping priorities
and interests.
32. See, in particular, De Maistre’s Considerations on France and Study on
Sovereignty. Both appear in Th e Works of Joseph De Maistre,(1971). Benjamin
Constant’s “Th e Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns”
is included in Th e Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings from
Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (1997, 65–70). For excellent retrospective discus-
sions of Rousseau as a proto-totalitarian, see Iain Hampsher-Monk (1995) and
Wokler (1995).
33. Th is distilled list of charges against Rousseau is outlined in Robert Wok-
ler (1995, 189–91).
34. G. W. F. Hegel (1991). Hegel explicitly mentions Rousseau in Part Th ree,
passages 153 and 258. His discussion of the upbringing of children in passage 174
also engages Rousseau’s Emile and the characterization in it of the kind of teach-
ing advocated by John Locke. See also Marx (1984) and (1978, 66–125).
35. Patrick Riley is not among Rousseau’s critics. Still his formulation in Will
and Political Legitimacy (1982, 112–13) is useful for understanding this point.
Riley argues that will is a concept of individuality and particularity. It can only
be spoken of as general metaphorically.
4. fanonian national consciousness
1. Fanon (1963, 315). Hereafter, all references to Wretched of the Earth are
cited as WE.
2. For a related discussion from which I have learned a great deal, see Paget
Henry (2009a). He advances the view that Rousseau’s “general will,” an eff ort
F6183.indb 254F6183.indb 254 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
Notes to pages 135–58 255
to honor and realize the values and aspirations of the public self of the nation,
is rearticulated by C. L. R. James in a proletarian or postbourgeois form as
the “creative self-movements” of the majority classes of workers and farmers in
Trinidad and England.
3. Rousseau’s discussions of violence do not describe collectivities facing
one another. Instead they focus primarily on encounters of individuals, as in
the case when he says that the enslaved are entitled violently to rebel so long
as it was likely to be eff ective. He does, in addition, describe instances when
disenfranchised majorities face singular tyrants. Evident in the closing pages
of his Second Discourse, while discussing the fi nal stage of inequality, in which
all private individuals return again to equality because they are all nothing be-
neath a tyrant for whom the only laws are his own idiosyncratic and ephemeral
whims. For Rousseau, this constitutes a return to “the law of the strongest” and
a new state of nature. Only the master because strongest, Rousseau says he can
be ousted since “he has no cause to protest against violence. Th e uprising that
ends in the strangulation or the dethronement of a sultan is as lawful an act as
those by which he disposed of the lives and goods of his subjects the day before”
(1987, 79).
4. Both models usually coexist within societies, with some, who fully belong,
primarily occupying spheres that law is seen to constitute and protect while oth-
ers experience these same government mechanisms as primarily punitive and
violent. Th e consistency of this coexistence is one of the many dimensions of
political life obscured in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) depiction of a trajectory
through which the polis on the model of the classical city-state is displaced by
that of the camp. Iterations of both are as old as theorizing about politics much
of which in turn involves eff orts of those outside political relations to expand
their realm in ways that clarify foundational political concepts from freedom to
personhood.
5. Th is is akin to Rousseau’s discussion of benighted Europeans who must
eliminate internal barriers of amour propre and structural institutions of in-
equality really to experience liberty.
6. Amour propre has a similar, if distinct, eff ect on Europeans to the extent
to it causes them to see one another only in instrumental terms.
7. For a highly illuminating discussion of this point, see Bernard Boxill
(1992) on the nature of “self-respect.”
8. Fanon writes, “for all the speeches about the equality of human be-
ings—these cannot hide the commonplace fact that seven Frenchmen killed
or wounded kindles indignation of civilized consciousness while massacre of
whole populations is treated as unimportant (WE, 89). He notes as well that
after seven years of crime in Algeria, not a single Frenchman had been indicted
in a French court of justice for the murder of an Algerian (92).
F6183.indb 255F6183.indb 255 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
256 Notes to pages 162–71
5. thinking through creolization
1. Trouillot (2003, 34).
2. Political speech can aim to be more and less inclusive. Th e range of forms
of American English spoken when politicians campaign for the presidency is
striking. In those instances, one index of the diversity of the US citizenry be-
comes evident. One could ask whether this diversity is a strength or a sign of
ongoing segregaion of various communities from each other since autonomous
and distinctive accents often betoken economic and social isolation of both the
privileged and their opposites.
3. Stephen Palmié (2006, 236) argues that this is a function of much of the
rest of the globe becoming more Caribbean as locations where previously sepa-
rate worlds collide multiply.
4. By evil or problematic, Schmitt off ered as specifi c examples being corrupt,
weak, cowardly, stupid, brutal, sensual, vital, or irrational; by unproblematic or
“good,” Schmitt meant reasonable, perfectible, capable of being manipulated or
taught, or peaceful.
5. Cornell made these comments in a discussion at the University of Cape
Town in February 2009 following a presentation of an earlier essay version of
what became this chapter.
6. Th ere is disagreement about the word’s etymology, though it is always
linked either to Portuguese or to Spanish, with Kamau Brathwaite provoca-
tively suggesting that it combines the Spanish word criar (to create, imagine,
establish, and found) with colon (a colonist, founder, settler) into criollo, one
identifi ed with the area of settlement, localized through blending, though not
ancestrally indigenous to it (1974, 10).
7. Chaudenson observes that creole people “preceded by many years the lan-
guages that are identifi ed by the same name.” For discussion of the many diff er-
ent ways that creole people were defi ned throughout the French colonies, from
designating locally born whites, mulattos, or blacks to identifying specifi cally
those who were not Franco-Mauritian, Indo-Mauritian, or Sino-Mauritian, to a
way of referring to those whose primary or only language was Creole as opposed
to an immigrant or more offi cial tongue, see Chaudenson (2001, chap. 1).
8. Eriksen (2007) explains that there are a variety of ways that groups can
relate to each other in such circumstances. One group can be culturally ab-
sorbed into another; groups can merge to form another entity; a hierarchical
complementary or competitive relationship can follow; one group can extermi-
nate another, and so on.
9. Schuchardt insisted that universal linguistic structures were key to un-
derstanding Creole genesis and the processes of their emergence were therefore
crucial to understanding language change everywhere.
F6183.indb 256F6183.indb 256 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
Note to page 171 257
10. Th e fi rst such approach is perhaps most evident in one of the two camps
that continues to dominate contemporary creole linguistic scholarship, in the
extensively cited writing of Derek Bickerton and John McWhorter. Insisting
on defi ning creole languages according to criteria inherent to the languages
themselves (rather than by the sociohistorical conditions for their emergence),
they insist that these are languages that grew out of rudimentary tongues devel-
oped in the absence of any fi rst language resources and that they thereby off er
the closest approximation of protohuman language. As such, they supposedly
provide insights into the workings of our genetic capacity for speech in their
crudest, unelaborated form. Th ey are universal, in this view, to the extent that
they are shorn of particular varieties of cultural elaboration. John McWhorter
writes, for example, “Because as a rule any language spoken on earth traces back
to unbroken development from a former full language (or languages), when we
see pidgins transformed into creoles we come closest to witnessing the birth of a
human language” (2001, 138). His position is indebted to Derek Bickerton who
distinguishes among a range of situations between the normal child in a normal
language community who masters his or her ancestral language through the
linguistic input of elders and the feral or traumatized child in isolation with no
mastery of any language (1977, 63). He writes, “One situation that stands be-
tween these poles is surely that of the child of speakers of an unstable pidgin in
a displaced community where ancestral languages are of very limited utility. . . .
Th e pidgin that is presented as a model is, in comparison with its competitors,
too impoverished and unstable a medium to serve all the communicative needs
of an individual. Th is matters not at all to the pidgin speaker, who will usually
have fellow-speakers of his own language to consort with. But the child creole
speaker will be driven to ‘expand’ the pidgin through a ‘process [that] must
consist of internalizing linguistic rules for which there is no evidence in terms
of linguistic outputs. If such rules are not induced from primary data, they must
be derived directly from the human faculté de langage’ ” (64). Michel DeGraff
(2003) characterizes the depiction of creole languages as the fruit of abnormal
breaks in transmission with an exceptional genealogy as a manifestation of the
search for primitive language or for living linguistic fossils not far removed from
depictions of the Caribbean as an early Eden in the writings of Rousseau. Th ere
was, emphasizes Alleyne, signifi cant diversity within the Caribbean, including
instances like Jamaica where populations of adult male slaves came largely from
the same places of origin and shared languages. More frequent were cases in
which no single African language was numerically dominant, which would have
led to rapid linguistic deculturation and replacement by a shared medium that
would have been the primary shared language of bi- and multilingual adults
and the fi rst language of their children. Th is would be rather diff erent from
pidgins that were used in instances of trade by communities in sporadic contact
F6183.indb 257F6183.indb 257 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
258 Notes to pages 171–72
who, from the store of their own languages and exposure to lingua franca, made
guesses about words and phrases that could be understood in instances of cross-
cultural communication (174).
11. Th is debate over defi ning creole languages according to their intrinsic
structural features or by the sociohistorical conditions of their emergence has
largely eclipsed earlier debates over the genesis of creole languages as mono- or
polygenetic. Th e former position suggested that all subsequent creole languages
derived from one Afro-Portuguese protopidgin lingua franca spread through the
Portuguese sea empire while polygenetic advocates argued for separate ancestry.
Also much contested was whether creole languages were simplifi ed, restructured
varieties of European lexifi ers or derived from non-European languages and re-
lexifi ed through contact languages. Th ese are respectively called the super- and
substratist positions.
12. Mufwene writes, “[Creoles] are socially disfranchised dialects of their
lexifi ers, especially since dialects of the same language need not be mutually in-
telligible” (1998, 7). DeGraff (2003) continues, that what emerges with Haitian
Creole (HC) is not substantively diff erent from what follows in other instances
of language change through contact—core aspects of its grammar (sound pat-
terns, verb and object placement, infl ectional morphology) fall within develop-
mental patterns in instances of “regular” language change. Indeed, he suggests,
it could be argued that French and HC and English and Jamaican Creole are
closer to each other than French and Latin or English and proto-Germanic.
13. One might compare the role of lexifying and substrate languages to that
of theology and religion in Edward Blyden’s (1994) classic observation that “you
may change the theology of a people, but you cannot change their Religion.”
Th is is a key point about creolization—although focused on the emergence of
new forms out of once separated and perhaps antagonistic genealogies—people
do not construct from nothing. Th ey forge out of the materials at hand, from
particular, even if ruptured, ways of understanding relations that structure and
animate life worlds. To continue to be meaningful, however, these had to be
refashioned in light of new circumstances so that the results were both continu-
ous and distinctive.
14. Th is question becomes one of great contestation when it comes to proj-
ects of standardizing creole languages so that they can be written. For some, the
basis should be the more autonomous, conservative basilect forms spoken in ru-
ral areas that have changed far more slowly because of their ongoing economic
and social isolation. Others argue that the mesolect urban varieties are better
windows into larger processes of creolization, creativity, and innovation. For
their critics, these are the tongues of relative elites that are coming to resemble
too closely the European languages that supply much of their vocabulary (see
F6183.indb 258F6183.indb 258 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
Notes to pages 172–74 259
Romaine 1994). Such matters are not narrowly academic and indeed are in-
formed by an eff ort to balance recognition of the international cultural capital
of European languages along with the local signifi cance of basilect creole lan-
guages. While Prime Minister Michael Th omas Somare of Papua New Guinea
argued that English skills be nurtured to foster international trade relations in
ways that simultaneously would avoid its saturating Tok Pisin, which, he ar-
gued, should remain the home and aff ective language that could bridge growing
urban and rural divides (Romaine 1994, 37–38), others insisted that prioritizing
teaching creole in order to enfranchise alienated Caribbean students eff ectively
create a two-tiered education system that would intensify the perceived illit-
eracy of most of the citizenry in the eyes of its elite and the world beyond them
(123, 128). DeGraff insists that this has only emerged as a dilemma because of
the ongoing prizing of European language by local Caribbean elites seeking to
affi rm their unique cultural capital through insisting on the indispensability of
a language that separates them from most of the rest of the polity.
15. In some of these instances one sees the survival of larger pieces of distinct
traditions that continued to be practiced by separate communities and, from a
greater distance, to infl uence one another. With agriculture and cuisine, the con-
struction of homes, and prescription of herbal medicines, the pre-enslavement
practices of African people (who came from intertropical regions comparable to
those in which they now found themselves) were more relevant or easily adapt-
able than many of the life ways of their previously European counterparts.
16. Mufwene explains that the main diff erence between child language ac-
quisition and second language is that in the latter, learners can draw on features
in previously spoken languages and therefore have a pool of competing features
that child learners lack.
17. I would like to thank Hilary Dick for insisting that I take seriously that
language is not always used to facilitate clear communication.
18. One could think here of the many instances of such words and phrases
generated by academic speech and prose. Th e use of the word disconnect or hu-
man as nouns come immediately to mind.
19. A puzzling feature of even Chaudenson’s (with Mufwene) (2001) often
masterful work is their resistance to eff orts to explore similarities among creole
languages with diff erent European lexifi ers that combine with the same or re-
lated substrates. Part of this appears to be a response to the criticism of what
Dillard (1970) called “the cafeteria principle,” or the over-eager and not suffi -
ciently sophisticated linking of creole to any African language that appeared to
share words or morphemes. However, given that subsequent rigorous explora-
tion has disentangled words that do appear to be shared across many African
languages and much of the Caribbean from more specifi c linguistic tributaries
F6183.indb 259F6183.indb 259 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
260 Notes to pages 174–75
(see especially Parkvall 2000), I suspect that the ongoing aversion is twofold: it
is (rightly or wrongly) assumed to be a function of a romantic approach to race
and racial identifi cation and a refl ection of a very real concern with the ways in
which radical inequalities appeared to mark language development more sig-
nifi cantly than symbolic forms expressed through music, dance, cooking, and
healing and religious practices.
20. One might think here of the delight at a Jewish seder of representing the
fully global nature of “Jewish food.” Th is might draw in recipes from India and
China, from Singapore and Nigeria, as well as from Poland, Spain, Argentina,
and Morocco. In some cases, the enthusiasm would be little more than a refl ec-
tion of a trendy cosmopolitan ethos hungry for ever-new hedonistic pleasures.
In others, it is an eff ort to grapple with what it means to share in a community
that is both so diverse and one that has historically thought of itself as bound
by shared blood and ancestry. Creolization helps to understand the meaning of
food in diasporic communities more generally or how it is, in particular, that
the range of foods called “Jewish” in China, India, Nigeria, Russia, and New
Jersey, for all their distinctness also are marked by suffi cient continuities to re-
main under one compelling category. Th is is often, as Claudia Roden (1998) has
suggested, the consequence of eff orts to comply with specifi cally Jewish dietary
laws, the holidays around which much food preparation and eating revolved
and revolves, and the specifi c, often more cosmopolitan networks (because of
merchants and peddlers, traveling rabbis, teachers and beggars, as well as the
more widespread propensity for migration and exile) of Jews within their varied
locations. It is often those who do not retain connections to particular physi-
cal territory who cling most tenaciously to the continuity of these practices.
Th e same, of course, could be said of Chinese and Indian cuisines that refl ect
both what is available and local culinary tastes at the same time as particular
prohibitions, dishes and dates of unique signifi cance, and distinctive communal
networks that bridge the domestic and foreign. In all such examples, one recog-
nizes what creolization describes: elements that are continuous and shared with
those that are new and diff erent. Th eir combination emphasizes the contingent
ways that commitments to or identifi cation with particular practices and cus-
toms will be made and remade in light of the mandates of new circumstances.
As such, one particular form is precisely that, one of many instantiations of
an eff ort to keep a form living, refashioning it afresh in new environments. I
emphasize the Jewish example because it reintroduces another key dimension
of creolization: that of surprising genealogical developments. For many Ashke-
nazic Jews, the suggestion by other Jews that their food is so Eastern European
is a surprise and an insult, an example of the ways in which they are but one
instantiation of Jewishness (rather than the only and universal standard) and are
F6183.indb 260F6183.indb 260 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
Notes to pages 175–79 261
of course implicated by societies in which they were marginal and from which
most ultimately had to fl ee.
21. One could think here of the centrality of newly arrived immigrant groups
to the eating economies in any major city.
22. One could here consider the tendency among Jamaican candidates for
political offi ce, observed by Reisman (1970, 140), of trying to indicate authen-
ticity by using patois or the borrowing in the U.S. of black idioms by the full
range of races of speakers when trying audibly to be soulful or even moral.
23. Refl ect here on the omnipresence of the phenomenon of “the black best
friend” (who is a plot device rather than a character) in historical and contem-
porary US fi ction, fi lm, and television. His or her sole purpose is to enable and
drive on the protagonist’s quest to realize his or her aspirations.
24. Ernest Pépin and Raphaël Confi ant (1998, 98) and Wilson Harris (1998,
23) have also argued that créolité is not only an approach to the present and
future but also a particular orientation toward the past. Th ey suggest, more
specifi cally, that créolité involves rediscovering another history of the world,
one that makes visible its multiplicity; that what we in an undiff erentiated way
call Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, and East Indian were all past créolités. Th is view
of creolization is precisely what I hope could infect the textual study of political
theory, especially if we want the exploration of our canon better to illuminate
contemporary and unfolding politics. Th is would also suggest that the instances
of imperial decadence that Rousseau so scathingly criticized as undercutting
the possibility of productive human inquiry were also some of the most heavily
creolized.
25. For a discussion of Hannah Arendt’s rejection of modeling notions of
sovereignty on a monotheistic G-d, see Jane Anna Gordon (2009).
26. Although the literature of creole creative writers is oriented primarily by
a committed refusal to become or endorse the historical role of cultural gate-
keepers, there are quite diff erent pressures within creole linguistics. In this con-
text, one treats a language as more than a derivative dialect through giving it of-
fi cial, standardized form. As I have argued, this poses questions of choosing one
over other versions of a linguistic continuum and, within it, the orthographic
system that is most appropriate. Creole linguists have stressed that these dilem-
mas diff er in diglossic contexts, such as Jamaica (and much of the Anglophone
Caribbean), in which the “creole continuum” refers to the linguistic variation
between the standard, offi cial language, and acrolect and the creole basilect
(Winford 1994, 43). In such circumstances the standard European language, for
instance, English on the British model, is considered with prestige and treated
unqualifi edly as the preferred language of public communication, literacy, and
education. Th e primary language of only a very small elite, for the rest who
F6183.indb 261F6183.indb 261 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
262 Notes to pages 179–89
face few educational and occupational opportunities or motivation to use it,
it is an index of status (Alleyne 1994, 12). Donald Winford affi rms that nega-
tive evaluations of creole languages as inferior derivatives are particularly strong
where they are associated with poverty, ignorance, and lack of moral character
(paraphrase of DeCamp cited in Winford 1994, 54). Still, with Reisman, Win-
ford affi rms that creole also carries positive symbolic meanings: where Standard
English dominates, creole is “intrinsically felt to be the code of the genuine”
(Reisman 1970, 140), a badge of friendship, intimacy, and solidarity. It is cre-
ole languages that do not compete with European languages to which they are
lexically related that are uncritically treated as separate languages and that have
most steadily proceeded to the status of national languages (Alleyne 1994, 10).
Th ey may still not be the equals of dominant European languages, but certainly
are not disdained. Th is is refl ected in the fact that they are called by their own
distinct names (Sranan, Sramaccan, Ndjuka in Suriname, for instance), rather
than simply as patois (Romaine).
27. For discussion of the relation of indigineity to creolism in the context of
Australia, see Robbie Shilliam (2011, 2012).
28. Ulf Hannerz (1992) makes a similar claim when he observes that cosmo-
politanism to make sense requires a comparatively rooted referent.
29. Eriksen (2007, 163) notes that in Mauritius, the identity, Creole, increas-
ingly incorporates those traditionally considered Creole—dark-skinned, work-
ing class people of African/Malagasy descent—and “postmodern Creoles,” who,
for various reasons, primarily intermarriage, do not fi t anywhere (they do not
belong to one of the distinct Asian or European communities) and speak Kreol
as their fi rst language. Having once specifi cally referred to people of (mixed)
African/Malagasy descent, to claim this identity in this new, broader way is
not to try actively to assert a distance from African/Malagasy people. He notes
that Creoles are considered to be more tolerant of intermarriage than other
groups and most signifi cantly, that “one can become a Creole within one’s own
lifetime—while one cannot conceivably become a Hindu, a Sino-Mauritian,
or a Franco-Mauritian.” Eriksen emphasizes that within Indian communities,
although Kreol is spoken, the language of reference is an Indian language and
there is a self- identity premised on notions of purity, continuity, and bound-
aries. Creoles, by contrast, do not have fi xed criteria of membership and are
associated with impurity and individualism. Kreol is still seen as a primarily oral
idiom that lacks history and literature and as superfi cial compared to languages
of great civilizations.
30. For further discussion of this argument, see the discussion of the hybrid
monster as exemplifi ed by Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela in Jane Anna
Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon (2009, chap. 4).
F6183.indb 262F6183.indb 262 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
Notes to pages 189–98 263
31. Lewis Gordon recently observed that when asked to present ideas among
colleagues and interested lay people, philosophers and political theorists in-
creasingly present “job talks,” or papers that demonstrate their skill as readers
of canonical texts, techniques for which they might be (and usually are already)
employed. Th is is, Gordon laments, one of many manifestations of the increas-
ing colonization of the academy by the market, one of many instances of schol-
ars taking the cues for the substantive focus and approach of their work from
what has been shown to lead to professional awards and opportunities. See, for
instance, Lewis Gordon (2010b).
32. None of this is to underestimate the decimation of universities taking
place in many parts of the world (while others are experiencing unparalleled
moments of growth). Consider, for example, Tunde Bewaji’s exploration of the
destruction of Nigerian universities in “Epistemicide, Epistemic Defi cit, Sterile
Leadership and the Vicious Cycle of African Underdevelopment,” presented at
the Caribbean Philosophical Association meeting, October 2011, Rutgers Uni-
versity at New Brunswick.
33. One might consider here the diff erence between the cosmopolitan who
travels the world, able always to set the terms with which diff erence is encoun-
tered and the stateless migrant who has constantly to negotiate and navigate ex-
isting rules whether of immigration restrictions or prevailing linguistic norms.
Creolized outcomes are more likely to emerge from the latter example.
34. I would like to thank my colleague Heath Fogg Davis for pushing me to
consider this question.
35. On this point, consider a recent essay by David Adamany, “Are Political
Scientists Ready for Politics,” presented at the annual State Politics and Policy
Conference, Springfi eld, Illinois, June 2010.
36. Such realms, clearly for us, are those that can coherently be conceived as
ones that might have originated from the mind and hands of G-d and that, in
so doing, make the very notion of G-d conceivable.
37. As Cristina Beltrán (2010) has demonstrated, we need to produce the
terms of commonality through which we might individuate ourselves through
acting with others in ways that forge webs of meaningful human relations in
what alone can secure particular dimensions of self-realization.
38. Jaspers here was writing about Max Weber, suggesting that he had grap-
pled with a situation in which we were all enmeshed.
39. It may also, suggests Adom Getachew, involve pushing for a more frag-
mentary historiography that does not silence the voices of the vanquished or the
unexpected, the contingent moments when things could have been otherwise,
when in refusing to follow sedimented roles, new collectivities might emerge.
See her “Reconceptualizing the Universal in the Haitian Revolution,” a paper
F6183.indb 263F6183.indb 263 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
264 Notes to pages 198–207
presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association meeting, October 2011 at
Rutgers University New Brunswick.
40. Th ough there are writers who have persuasively likened US academic
institutions to the plantation. For an example, see Houston Baker (2006).
41. Still, this is not to say that aspects of them are not elusive. It is for this
reason that Norton (2004b) cautions against the self-congratulatory spirit she
perceived to saturate many problem-solving approaches to the study of politics.
In other words, while creolization does break from an approach to culture and
to disciplines as sealed off little units modeled on semisovereign territories that
are wholly discrete, internally coherent and logical, it does not therefore sug-
gest that we are not always already enmeshed in symbolic worlds or universes
of meaning. We do not and cannot step into and outside of culture, as much
multicultural writing suggests, or into a domain completely outside of represen-
tational life. Indeed, even, perhaps especially, “the wilderness” is wrought with
symbolic meaning.
42. It is for this reason that a creolized positivism is most likely impossible.
conclusion
1. Th is passage comes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1831, 8). Describ-
ing the process of trying to think of a story, she tried to imagine a tale that
“would speak to mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—
one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken
the beatings of their heart.”
2. Consider as examples the single-authored and edited volumes in the
Global Encounters book series, Dallmayr’s 2010 comparative political theory
textbook, and the writings of Jenco, Ackerly (2005), Godrej, and March.
F6183.indb 264F6183.indb 264 12/2/13 9:26:59 AM12/2/13 9:26:59 AM
265
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Index
abnormal, 86, 173, 258aboriginal(s), 136, 183Achille, Louis-T., 241nAdamany, David, 264nAfrica, 52, 129, 168, 169, 193, 214, 234, 249, 253African(s), 22, 49, 152, 153, 154, 158, 170, 177,
182, 225, 229, 260, 263; civilization, 211; diaspora, 142, 210; framed as lacking culture, 182; languages, 258, 260; sounding French, 179; struggling for freedom, 215; unity, 153
African American(s), 42, 219, 262nAfricana philosophy, 12, 243Agamben, Giorgio, 256agency, 65, 73–75, 84, 89, 93, 131, 138, 149, 158,
161, 174, 207, 220, 255; cultural, 57Alexander, Amanda, 213Algeria, 19, 20, 21, 25, 70, 75, 85–87, 127, 131,
142, 244n, 255n; men in, 87; occupied, 186; prized French colony, 247; war in, 129–38, 150, 158, 160–61, 162, 227, 248n; women in, 143–46, 233n
Algerian School of Psychiatry, 86Alleyne, Mervyn C., 182, 258n, 263nAmerican Political Science Association, xiii, 254nanimals, 45–46, 48, 60, 74, 96, 101, 236n, 249n;
anthropomorphizing of, 57; “savages” and, 236n
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 166Aravamudan, Srinivas, 228nArendt, Hannah, 31, 194, 231n, 262nAristotle, 40, 96, 102, 114, 203, 207, 211, 237n;
on gods and beasts, 249nAsante, Molefi , 163Asia, 192, 208, 209, 263; slave trade in, 169, 214;
Southeast, 60Asian(s), 49Asian-Americans, 182audience(s), 135, 194, 218
Aurenche, Louis, 61Austin, J. L., 253n, 254nAustin, John, 251Australia, 208, 263nauthority, 12–14, 29, 36, 37, 39, 78, 107, 120,
133, 148, 185, 192, 229n; charismatic, 141; -complex, 77; hereditary conceptions of, 97–98; of the law, 122; of leaders, 130
bad faith, 253nBaker, Houston, 265nBall, Terence, 194Barry, Brian, 251n, 252nBarvosa, Edwina, xiiiBelton, Don, vii, xivBeltrán, Cristina, 264nBenhabib, Seyla, 165, 166, 214Bernabé, Jean, 177, 179Bewaji, J. A. I., 223, 264nBhabha, Homi K., 5, 166Bickerton, Derek, 258nBiko, Steve, 213black(s), 18, 22, 69–74, 80, 158, 162, 176–77,
182–84, 213, 225n, 227n–228n, 244n, 257n; bodies, 73; child(ren), 86, 242n; colonized subjectivity of, 67; enslaved, 23, 152; exis-tentialists, xiv; girls, 252n; insularity of, 68; intellectuals, xiv; men, 241n, 242n, 244n, 255n; nationalists, 186, 255n; New World, 76; person, 66, 248n; poets, 57; problem, 58, 77; racism against, 67, 69, 233n; radical thought, 14, 16; the, 21, 80; women, 83, 214; writers, 241n, 245n
black civilization, 243nblack consciousness, 66, 186, 213blackness, 64–72; Caribbean, 216–17black studies, 212Bloom, Allan, 123Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 258n
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Bolland, O. Nigel, 76, 181, 184Bonaparte, Napoleon, 58Bondy, François, 247n, 249nBoxill, Bernard R., 222n, 255nBoulle, Pierre H., 23bourgeoisie, 20, 119, 152, 154, 243n; colonized,
142; national, 132, 151–55, 183; pseudo-, 136, 146; triumph in the French Revolution, 235n
Bowden, Brett, 208Braidwood, Stephen J., 23Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 257nBrazil, 20, 228n, 229nBrowers, Michaelle, xiii, 175, 205, 207Buck-Morss, Susan, 8, 170, 182, 190, 210, 211,
222n; on universal history, 212–16Buff on, Comte de, 236nBulhan, Hussein Abdilahi, 84–86, 89, 93, 246n,
257n, 248nBurke, Edmund, 58
Canada, 22Canovan, Margaret, 125capitalism, 151, 158; global, 189; mercantile, 188Caribbean, 2, 10–12, 19, 21–22, 42, 50, 60, 162,
163, 175–76, 186–87, 192, 210, 214, 216, 229, 257n, 262n; as birthplace of modernity, 179–82; fi fteenth-century, 193; music in, 174, 192, 207; plantation societies of, 182; Renais-sance men and women of, 195; slavery in, 213, 228n, 239n, 258n; students, 260
Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA), xii, 264n
Caribbean studies, 212Carson, Anne, 222nCassirer, Ernst, 48–49, 61, 145, 166Caws, Peter, 74Chamoiseau, Patrick, 177, 179chaos, 200, 203; disciplinary, 218Charvet, John, 122–23, 252nChaudenson, Robert, 169, 170, 171, 172, 177,
256n, 260nCherki, Alice, 64, 225n, 245n, 246nchildren, 41, 118, 234n, 235n, 247n; arts for,
242n, 258n; black, 67, 69, 72; breast-feeding of, 240; feral, 21; political, 131; treating the masses as, 148; rich man’s, 236; Rousseau’s relationship with his, 240; underdeveloped, 96; upbringing of, 255n
China, 149, 225n, 234n, 239a, 261nchoice, 53, 68–69 76, 81, 217, 240n; and free-
dom, 84, 120Christian missionaries, 50, 57, 67Christianity, 162, 233n; principles of, 53Christianized teleology, 25citizenship, 213; 225ncivilization(s), 8, 23–24, 36, 42, 67, 72, 90, 92,
110–11, 170, 177, 214–15, 236n, 243n; African, 211; “clash of,” 209; Egyptian, 223n; Enlight-
enment and, 55; European, 245n; French, 227n–228n; Islamic, 208; “negro,” 244n
Cladis, Mark, 101, 125Cohen, Robin, 189Cold War, 123; post-, 208colonialism, 4, 9, 16, 76–77, 80, 89, 93, 118, 129,
130, 156, 209, 212; coloniality, 78; ending of, 147, 153; epistemic, histories of, 212, 214; lega-cies of, 158, 216; Négritude writers on, 187; options imposed by, 143; settler, 11; supposed nonexistence of, 138; violence of, 244n
colonies, 21–23, 66–67, 77–78, 85, 92, 137, 168, 177, 192, 210, 227, 242n, 246n, 257n
Comaroff , Jean, xvComaroff , John, xiii, xvcommunication, 53, 103, 106, 214, 252n, 260n,
262n; cultural, 60, 258n; political, 56; process of, 173
Communist Party (French), 245ncomparative political theory, 2, 5, 17, 175, 203,
205, 207–14, 264n. See also political theoryConfi ant, Raphaël, 179, 262nconsciousness, 21, 214, 233, 263n; Black, 213;
double, 207; of Europeans, 93; national, 17, 126–61, 183–84, 256n; third-person, 66
conservatism, 16, 179; neo-, 165Constant, Benjamin, 123, 255nconstitution(s), Dessalines’, 213; French, 213; Hai-
tian, 213; Jacobin, 213; South African, 168constitutionalism, 167consumption, 34Cooper, Laurence, 253nCornell, Drucilla, xv, 168, 198, 257nCorsica, 117–20, 133, 150, 230ncourage, xiv, 41, 66, 131, 230n, 233n, 246nCranston, Maurice, 26, 28, 38, 43, 58, 231n,
233n, 239n, 240ncreature(s), 24, 45, 57, 60, 73, 78, 85; symbolic,
93, 164Creole(s), 2, 6, 60, 172, 182, 185, 214, 240n, 263n;
color infl ection of, 182; elite, 16, 183; fi rst written use of, 169, 259n; Haitian, 10, 174–75, 178, 210, 259n; languages, 60, 171–77, 190, 258n–263n; linguistics, 7, 172, 178–79, 190, 195, 258n–263n; national identities of, 181; newly indigenous, 182; origins of, 2, 160, 169–72, 260n; passing for, 242n; postmodern, 263n; slaves, 172, 241n; writers, 262n
créolité, 179, 261n, 262n. See also Glissant, Édouard
creolization, passim, but see especially xii–xiii, xv, 1–17, 22, 76, 157, 162, 163–201, 213, 219, 222n, 256n, 261n; as accurate portrait of human life, 164–69, 177, 181, 185, 261n–262n; of canonical fi gures, 1–2, 9; creolizing, 188–200; de-, 7, 12, 186, 220, 222n; of dis-ciplines, 6, 11–16, 217, 264n; distinguished from, 6–7, 170, 175; in literary criticism, 6, 12; as methodology, 4, 7, 16, 55, 199, 217;
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process of, 7, 9, 179, 181–83, 199–201; as a project, 5, 119; in universalizing thought, 163
Crichlow, Michaeline A., 189crime(s), 40, 87, 88, 142, 222n, 228n, 233n, 256ncriminal(s), 38, 158, 246ncriticism, 6, 17, 81Crocker, Lester, 102, 121, 123crowd(s), 154Cuba, 20culture(s), 143, 145, 155, 156, 164–79, 182, 183,
191, 192, 211, 214–17, 225n, 228n, 237n–243n, 245n, 265n; as agent, 166; colonizing, 187, 189; decadent, 160; eradicating, 159; hegemonic, 175; living, 161; minority, 156, 168; national, 184; nature of, 164–65; perme-ability of, 166; pluralistic, 181; as property, 165; “purifying,” 186, 189, 205; shared, 157, 181, 215; as symbolic world, 196, 199–200; translation of, 207
Curry, Tommy, 223n, 252n
Dagger, Richard, 107, 253nDahl, Robert, 194, 220Dallmayr, Fred, 204, 206–10, 265nDamrosch, Leo, 20, 26, 28, 225n, 230n, 231n,
232n, 239nDarnton, Robert, 224nDayan-Herzbrun, Sonia, 224nDeCamp, David, 263ndecadence, xii, 9, 17, 34, 36, 42; of eighteenth-
century France, 78, 262nDeGraff , Michel, 177, 178, 258n, 259n, 260nde las Casas, Bartolomé, 50de Maistre, Joseph, 123, 255ndemocracy, passim, but see especially 109, 114,
119, 249n–250n; debate on founding of, 141; liberal, 165; participatory, 147
Diaz, Vincente, 182Diderot, Denis, 26, 28, 36, 51, 57, 230n, 232n,
233n, 250n; Encyclopedia of, 60Dillard, J. L., 253ndiscipline(s), academic, 3, 6, 11–12, 15, 81, 169,
189, 190, 191, 194–95, 197, 265n; of the body, 144; creolizing, 220; disciplining, 199; un-, 163
Djemaï, Cheikh, 20, 225n, 246nDobie, Madeleine, 22, 23, 49, 227n–229n, 237n,
239nDouglass, Frederick, 237Du Bois, W. E. B., 16, 42, 76, 191, 219, 233nDu Bois, Laurent, 240nDuchet, Michèle, 43Durkheim, Emile, 45Dussel, Enrique, 137–38, 154–55, 157, 216Dworkin, Ronald, 252n
economy: Algerian, 150; colonial, 78; France’s, 22; local, 132, 152; political, 4, 47, 96, 120, 190, 191, 249n
education, xi, xii, 29, 34, 231n, 230n, 233n, 262n, 263n; enslaving, 83; political, 146, 148 230n; religious, 22; systems in the Carib-bean, 260
Ehlen, Patrick, 65, 80, 227n, 240n, 241n, 243nEinstein, Albert, 242nEngels, Friedrich, 223n, 236nequality, 18, 50, 97, 109, 133, 141, 238n, 245n,
248n, 256n; economic, 108, 124, 240n; legiti-mate, 110; natural, 110; political, 102; racial, 214n; radical, 184
Eriksen, Th omas Hylland, 170, 189, 257n, 263nethics, 9ethnicity, 85ethnic studies, 5, 208Euben, Roxanne L., 14, 51, 204–5, 237nEurocentrism, 56Europe, 12–14, 18, 28, 29, 30, 41, 50, 57, 61,
67, 68, 78, 110, 117, 152, 158, 169, 172, 176, 193, 228n, 242n, 244n, 247n, 248n, 249n; authority of, 192; intermediaries of, 132; mimicking, 129, 149, 246n, 248n; provin-cialization of, 88; sciences of, 239; Southern, 137; violence of, 252n; western, 5, 39, 168, 203, 205, 208, 209
European(s), passim, but see especially 12, 14, 18, 23, 50, 54, 67–68, 85–94, 116, 229n, 25n; becoming, 42; central, 167; class concerns of, 219; confrontations with others, 21–22, 52, 120, 135–41, 169, 209, 227n, 237b; Eastern, 167, 261n; globality of, 38; greed of, 52; imperial, 21, 23, 28, 42, 77–78, 235n, 247n; languages, 171, 173, 260n, 262n–263n; linguistics, 170, 359n, 260n; man, 40, 223n; metropole, 242n; mimicking of, 52, 130, 135, 170, 249n; modernity, 59, 72, 129, 162, 177, 191, 211, 227n–228n; myth, 30; political thinkers, 21, 40–41; self-anointed world judges, 51; Southern, 247n; travelogues of, 49; violence of, 158
evolution, 58, 65, 177; de-, 110extinction, 39
Fabian, Johannes, 238nFalaky, Fayçal, 229nFanon, Frantz, passim, but see especially 1–10,
18, 23, 222n–233n, 240n; on Algeria and Al-gerians, 85–86, 249n; on antiblackness, 57, 69–75, 83–86, 241n, 243n; at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, 86–87; canonization of, 20; challenge to white supremacy, 71; on colonial illness, 57; on colonial logic, 75–76, 84, 90; on colonialism versus domination, 77; creolizing and transcending Rousseau, 16–17, 61, 63, 65, 92–94, 120–28; on culture, 86; life of, 19–21, 64; dehumanization, 65; on epistemic colonization, 35, 78, 84; on freedom and unfreedom, 87, 89, 91, 133, 134, 136, 155, 160; on health, 84, 87; humanism
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and the human sciences, 74–79, 87; human-istic psychiatry of, 87; on intellectual work, 78; on interracial intimacy, 80, 83, 242n; on Jean Veneuse/René Maran, 68, 242n; on language, 187; on liberation as fi rst phi-losophy, 81; on liberatory education, 83; on meaning, 73; on method, 24–25, 63–76, 79–84, 95, 197; on mimicking colonizers, 117; on the national bourgeoisie, 132, 136, 142, 146, 151–55, 183; on national consciousness, 127–61, 183–84, 255n; on le nègre, 67, 71; on Négritude, 71–72, 78, 241n; on normality and normalization, 86; on normalization of colonial relations, 63, 66, 73–77, 86; on oppression, 76, 88, 143; on paradoxes of hu-man existence, 24; on petrifi cation, 70–73; on political legitimacy, 10, 127, 134, 136; on racial psychiatry and psychology, 80–81, 84, 89–90, 248n; on racism, 57–86; on radical democratic participation, 131; on “reason,” 72; on “speaking well,” 70; on slavery, 91; on sociogeny, 245n; on traditionalism, 76, 131–32, 143, 168, 184; on values, 69, 90–91; writings of, 1, 64, 80, 82, 219
Fanon-Mendes-France, Mireille, 224nFeld, Scott L., 252nFerdinand II of Aragon (King), 13Filmer, Sir Robert, 249nFirmin, Anténor, 16Fischer, Sibylle, 8, 176, 211–14Fleischmann, Ulrich, 180–81Foucault, Michel, 24, 210Frank, Jason, 134freedom, 13, 18, 20, 23, 46, 49, 53, 57, 61, 75, 79,
81, 84, 87, 91, 98, 106, 107, 109, 118, 119–21, 123–26, 129, 135, 137, 138, 142–44, 147, 151, 159, 160, 178, 212, 215, 225n, 255n, 256n; compromising of, 143, 160; to conform, 121; from constraint, 102, 106, 138; individual-ist, 123; meaningful, 102, 125, 131, 148, 161; moral, 49, 53, 57, 92; political, 61; seizing, 142, 131, 202; unfreedom, 63, 89, 91, 133–34, 136, 155, 160, 183
Freire, Paulo, 146Freud, Sigmund, 78, 192, 196, 236n, 247n
Gal, Susan, 173Gandhi, Mohandas, 206, 208Garel, Yvonne Patricia Solomon, vii, xiiiGarrard, Graeme, 251nGates, Henry Louis, Jr., 81Gay, Peter, 27, 82, 231nGebhardt, Jürgen, 209Geismar, Peter, 248ngeneral will, the, passim, but see especially 1,
3,17, 61, 90, 95–128, 184, 199, 249n–253n, 255n. See also Fanon, Frantz: on national consciousness; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
genocide, 169, 213nGermain, Felix, 227nGetachew, Adom, 264nGeuss, Raymond, 217nGibson, Nigel, 80, 213Gilroy, Paul, 170Glissant, Édouard, 179–81G-d, as self-evident, 26; conceptual capacity of,
264n; fi xity of species by, 60; inner voice of, 147; refutation of, 36; monotheistic concep-tion of, 262n; as source of justice, 112, 122; will of, 95
Godrej, Farah, xiii, 205, 206, 265nGordon, Elijah, xvGordon, Jane Anna, 223n, 262n, 263nGordon, Jennifer, xvGordon, Lewis R., xii, 74–75, 142, 199, 241n,
243; on experience without experience, 243n; on market colonization of intellectu-als, 263n; on questioning, 84; on situation-ality of fl esh and blood, 75; teleological suspension of disciplinarity, 89, 200; theory of perverse anonymity, 65
Gordon, Mathieu, xvGordon, Sula, xvGould, Stephen Jay, 86government, 31, 34, 112, 114, 119, 131–33, 136,
150, 151, 153, 177, 250n, 256n; consensual, 120; as distinguished from sovereignty, 124; and governing, 56, 148–49; illegitimate, 100, 118, 121; indirect, 154; legitimate basis of, 95, 102–3, 115, 249n
Gramsci, Antonio, 136, 207greed, 47, 69, 236nGreek(s) (ancient), 204, 205, 249n, 262nGrofman, Bernard, 252nGuadeloupe, 22, 227nGyekye, Kwame, 156–57
Haiti, 22, 211–15, 222n, 228n; Creole, 10, 174–78, 259n
Haitian Revolution, the, 13, 182, 211–15, 264n; enslaved who fought in, 176
Hall, Stuart, 170Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 123, 255nHannerz, Ulf, 188, 263nHarris, Wilson, 179, 262nHart, H. L. A., 252nHegel, G. W. F., 13, 222n, 236n; on Africa, 211;
Fanon on, 78, 192; on Haiti, 13, 212; on history, 212, 216; on Rousseau, 58, 123, 160, 255n; on slavery, 212–13
hegemony, 8, 137, 150, 158–59, 183; analogical, 157
Helenon, Veronique, 229nHenry, Paget, 8, 223n; on creolizing Caribbean
philosophy, 12, 192; on complex, synthetic methodology, 81; on the knowing subject, 14; on the general will, 255
Fanon, Frantz (continued)
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Hintzen, Percy, 182Hirschmann, Nancy, xi, 111Hobbes, Th omas, 36–37, 44, 101, 110, 119, 208,
228n, 234nhumanism, 142. See also Fanon, FrantzHonig, Bonnie, xiii, 122, 134, 141Huntington, Samuel, 208, 211
Ibsen, Henrik, 253nillegitimacy, 122, 133, 138, 158, 252n; challeng-
ing, 139–51; degrees of, 116; political, 90, 99, 135, 162
immigrants, 227nIndia(n), 8, 20, 162, 182, 186, 208, 209, 261n,
262n, 263nindigenous people(s), 10, 50, 169, 183, 186, 229n;
becoming indigenous, 3, 167, 170; creating what will be indigenous, 10, 132, 182, 186, 256n; an indigenous general will, 133, 146; indigenous needs, 89; indigenous nurses, 87; indigenous resources, 117, 149; indigenous systems of reference, 75, 89, 143, 167, 174
injustice, 32, 55, 240ninterdisciplinarity, 5–7,189, 191, 193Iran, 8, 20, 207Iraq, 167Irvine, Judith T., 173Isaac, Jeff rey C., 217Isabella I (Queen), 13
Jamaica, 174–75, 181–82, 184, 228n, 262n; Creole in, 259n, 262n; enslaved population of, 258n
James, C. L. R., xii, 16, 234n, 256nJameson, Frederic, 59Jaspers, Karl, 197, 264nJenco, Leigh Kathryn, 192, 206n–207n, 265nJews, 13, 245n, 261nJohnson, Walter, 174Johnston, Steven, 123, 254nJung, Hwa Yol, 205, 206justice, 47, 88, 96, 98, 104–5, 109, 112, 253n, 256n
Kant, Immanuel, 57, 97, 160Keenan, Alan, 122Kein, Sybil, 61Kelly, Christopher, 117Kennedy, Ellen, xi, 254nKhan, Aisha, 182, 188knowledge, 4, 6, 24, 38, 43, 53, 57, 61, 89, 111,
125, 197–98, 213, 215, 225n, 230n, 264n; colonization of, 192; deceitful, 41; episteme, 92; epistemic conditions of social life, 84, 91; necessarily symbolic, 145; new, 44, 204; origins of, 32; self-, 44, 51; specialized, 195, 231n; transgressive insight, 166
Kobayashi, Takuya, 224nKompridis, Nikolas, 166–67, 169Knies, Kenneth Danziger, 232nKymlicka, Will, 165, 214
Lacan, Jacques, 78Larson, Gerald James, 192, 205Latin America(n), 162, 209–11Latin American studies, 208Lau, Wai-keung, 225nlaw(s), 34, 47, 95–96, 101–7, 112, 230n, 237n,
244n, 249n, 252n, 256n; aff ecting all, 109; amending, 103; applying, 114; authority of, 122, 150; backed by force and wealth, 150; bad, 115–16, 122, 142; colonial, 244; dietary, 261n; divine, 113; eff ects of historical decisions and political power on, 252n; equality before, 141; equitable, 109–10; fi rst or foundational, 113; formal, 104; genera-tion of, 113–14, 134; good, 141; of justice, 112; legislating, 112–13, 115, 137; -like rules, 24, 74, 166; obedience to, 102, 231n; positive, 252n; purpose of, 134; for transformation from beasts, 101; wise, 47, 141. See also il-legitimacy; legitimacy
legitimacy, 14, 98, 107, 138, 155, 252n, 254n; of contract, 125–255n; democratic, 1, 114, 117, 155; force’s relation to, 156; foreign-ness marking gaps in, 122; of inequality, 56; norms of, 133; political, 2, 8, 10, 18, 90, 97–99, 108, 127, 127, 134–36, 160, 162; post-colonial, 127; realization of, 109; source(s) of, 102, 107, 126; varied degrees of, 116
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 58, 81, 237nliberalism, 207; classical, 207; neo-, 165, 184;
paranoid brand of, 123; political, 5, 191, 215. See also Rawls, John
liminal, the, 21, 63, 71, 176, 216–17Lionnet, Françoise, 226n–227nLocke, John, 44, 101, 167, 208, 228n, 255nLucas, Phillipe, 85lumpenproletariat, 130, 141, 142Luxemburg, Rosa, 90Lyceé Schoelcher, 64Lynch, John, 16
Macey, David, 20, 64, 65, 81, 82, 85, 243n, 245nMachiavelli, Niccolò, 13, 137, 204, 220, 233nMaldonado Torres, Nelson, xii, 56, 78, 81manicheanism, 132, 141Mannoni, Octavio, 77–78, 246nManoochehri, Abbas, 209Maran, René, 68March, Andrew, 205–6, 209, 265nMarx, Karl, 74, 90, 123, 174, 208, 222n, 223n,
236n, 255n; Marxist, 59, 74,116, 174, 236nMasoud, Tarek E., 217McBride, Keally, 250nMcBride, William, 250nMcCormick, John, 109, 252nMcWhorter, John, 258nMehta, Brinda, xii, 186Meijer, Guus, 170, 177Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 81, 205
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Middle Ages, the, 137, 208Mignolo, Walter, 212Mills, Charles, xii, 15, 210Mintz, Sidney W., 170Misir, Prem, 181–82Mngxitama, Andile, 213modernism, 157, 161, 163modernity, 14–16, 18, 38, 59, 65, 79, 96, 111,
125, 133, 160, 197, 212–20, 225n, 250n; and colonialism, 137, 181, 210; contradictions of, 163; early, 14, 39, 227n; European, 14, 21, 23, 55, 72, 92, 120, 127, 160, 162, 177, 191, 205, 211–12, 227n, 236n; global, 11, 179; multiple, 215; post-, 163, 178, 180, 199, 263n; pre-, 178; racial, 219; in social science, 58; thinkers of, 186; and traditionalism, 239; underside of, 216
Mohammed, Patricia, 186Monahan, Michael J., xii, 169Montaigne, Michel D., 31–32, 57Moody-Adams, Michele M., 185, 215morality, 81, 231nmorals, 26, 40, 51, 152, 232n, 235nMorello, Celeste A., 223nMoses (Moshe, biblical), 113, 142Mufwene, Salikoko S., 12, 171–73, 177, 190,
222n, 259n, 260nmulatto(es), 171–72, 242n, 257nMunasinghe, Viranjini, 163music, 10, 12, 19, 167, 172, 174, 175, 192, 232n,
235n, 240n, 253n, 261n; copyist, 20, 60; ethnomusicology, 55, 60, 166; as off ering key metaphors for politics, 114
Muslim(s), 13, 88, 208, 210, 223nMuthu, Sankar, 57, 227n, 228n, 238nMuysken, Pieter, 170, 177myth(s), 30, 38, 81, 130, 205, 224n, 246n;
mythic, 133; mythologized, 20
Näsström, Sofi a, 134nationalism, 85, 127, 131, 146, 181, 249n; crude
nationalism, 132, 152–56, 183; transnational-ism, 214
nature, 21, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 46, 48, 58, 60, 91, 98, 110, 111, 113, 123, 139, 149, 160, 164, 171, 236n, 237n, 254n; state of, 44, 45, 52, 53, 59, 100, 101, 110, 111, 159, 227n, 241n, 250n, 256n
négritude, 71–72, 78, 80, 81, 93, 187, 241n, 243n–244n
Neidleman, Jason Andrew, xiii, 117neoconservatism, 165Nettl, Bruno, 60Nietzschean, 146Th e “nigger(s),” 67, 83, 225n, 241n; bad nigger,
246n; niggerhood, 68nihilism, 254nNissim-Sabat, Marilyn, xii, 67Noël, Erick, 23
Noone, John B., Jr., 97, 251n, 254nNorth Africa, 19, 20, 21, 85, 163, 171, 172North African(s), 66, 89, 187, 210, 223, 227Norton, Anne, xi, 196, 198, 216, 218, 237n, 265nNouss, Alexis, 180
Obama, President Barack, 263nOgrodnick, Margaret, 115ontogeny, 245nontology, 254nOrtega y Gasset, José, 110–11Orwell, George, 56Ovid, 37–38, 234n
Pagden, Anthony, 52–54, 57Palestine, 20Palmié, Stephan, 163, 257nParekh, Bhiku, 166Parkvall, Mikael, 260Patois, 174, 262n, 263nPeabody, Sue, 229nPépin, Ernest, 262nPiven, Frances Fox, 218Plato, 31, 204, 208, 232n, 246n, 251npolitical science, xi, 11,194, 218; decreoliza-
tion in, 220; distanced from the world of politics, 194, 264n; as a fi eld of application, 15; as historically creolized, 194; as a human science, 220; methods in, 17; quantitative work in, 194; subfi elds of, 12
political theory, passim, but see especially xi–xii, 1–7, 13–17, 127, 133, 160, 163–64, 175, 188, 191, 196–200, 203–20; Africana, 67, 210, 241n, 243n; comparative, 2, 5, 7–8, 17, 48, 57–58, 65, 92, 175, 203–14, 216–17, 265n; canon of, 1, 13, 17, 20, 26, 82, 228n, 262n, 264n; creolizing, 1, 4, 7, 13–15, 164, 188, 197, 200; decolonial, 79, 131, 138, 147; feminist, 166; postmodern, 178. See also conservatism; liberalism
politics, passim, but see especially 15, 31, 95, 140, 141, 196; assimilationist, 65; beyond force, 96–98; colonial, 89; and the common self, 249n; creating equality through, 109; diff use nature of, 105; of “diversality” or “pluriversality,” 215n; domain of, 126, 136, 212; engaging dissensus and cultural diff er-ence, 128; in fi lm, 223n; future for, 150; and generality, 115, 155, 157; and inclusion, 188; maxims of, 113; of multiculturalism, 165, 189; “paradox” of, 122, 133; and the polis, 111, 249n; public terrain of, 187; of racial purity, 178; reason to write about, 98; of recogni-tion, 165; scholarly work on, 218n; scope of, 121; study of, 24, 196, 265n; of survival, 222n; tasks of, 115; and truth, 80. See also illegitimacy; legitimacy; political science
poststructuralism, 166, 188poverty, 47, 117, 143, 154, 262n
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Index 293
power, 99, 100, 117, 120; abuse of, xii, 240n; administrative, 113; balance of, 166; of the bourgeoisie, 154; capitalist rise in, 158; of communities, 155; of despots, 123; empty privileges of, 240n; executive, 107; fetishiz-ing of, 154; human, 44; imperial, 154, 158; indexes of power, 193; institutions of, 2; of kings, 121; legislative, 102–3, 114, 147; legitimate, 124; meaning of, 159; of molding ideas, 200, 203; monstrous mirroring of, 193; physical, 135; political, 13–14, 37, 29, 251n; revolutionary, xiv; seizing of, 155; of settler communities, 247n; social, 173; sovereign, 105, 107, 114, 121, 249n; struggles over, 185–86; supreme, 47, 250; symbolic, 158, 175–76, 183; total, 125; weakening of, 154; will to, 146
Prasad, Vijay, 183–85Pratt, Mary Louise, 175Présence Africaine, 245nproletariat, the, 184property, 40, 123; private, 34, 46, 49–50, 57, 74,
92, 165psychoanalysis, 219, 245nPuri, Shalini, 182purpose, 4, 35, 73, 98, 116,165, 175, 183, 185, 192,
206, 262; across generations, 113; common purpose, 113; of disciplinary approaches, 190; failing to fulfi ll one’s, 32, 155; of the general will, 100, 111; imposed from with-out, 58; of the legitimate leader, 153; of social structures, 87, 100
race(s), xi, 16, 70, 72, 74, 84, 85, 165, 177–78, 219, 226n, 246n, 262n; culture of, 229; Interracial Conference of 1949, 241n; intimacy between, 80, 242n–243n; mixed and mixing, 2, 80, 162, 169, 172, 177, 182, 187; romantic approaches to, 261n; saving the, 242n, 243n. See also blacks; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Fanon, Frantz; genocide; indig-enous; whites
racism, xi, 67, 73, 75, 86, 129, 153, 245n. See also Fanon, Frantz
Rawls, John, 9, 97, 160, 167, 206, 233nRehfeld, Andrew, 15Reinhardt, Catherine A., 227n, 229nReisman, Karl, 262n–263nreligion, 13, 33, 38, 53, 113,172, 234n; civil, 112,
121; as distinguished from theology, 259; in-dispensability of, 224n; priests of paganism on, 27; Voodoo, 211. See also Christianity
Renault, Matthieu, 88reparations, 158revenge, 137, 246nrevolution(s), 30, 41, 137, 139, 142–49, 151, 161,
168; age of, 211; Algerian, 21, 130, 143–46; 247n; of the enslaved, 213; French, 58, 212, 224n, 236n, 240n; Haitian, 13, 176, 213–15,
264n; Russian, 248; Spanish, 248; U.S./American, 216n
revolutionary: action, 214, 243n; humanism, 19; males in Algeria, 143; party, 148; politics, 130; power of committed love, xiv; slaves, 151, 211, 213; struggle, 130–32, 149, 161; the, 65; women in Algeria, 143–46, 233n
Riley, Patrick, 95–96, 255nRobinson, Cedric J., 208, 223nRoden, Claudia, 261nRomaine, Suzanne, 258–59, 263nRomberg, Raquel, 175, 183–85, 213Rome, 30, 31, 108, 148, 204, 223nRosenblatt, Helena, 95, 250nRousseau, Jean-Jacques, passim, but see especially
1, 9, 10, 18, 61; accused collectivism and totalitarianism of, 108, 121–23; as analyzed by Ernst Cassirer, 48–49; as caricatured by Voltaire, 239n; on conquest, 41, 54, 135, 233n; as contributing to the overturn-ing of the fi xity of species thesis, 60; as a contributor to the fi eld of ethnomusicology, 60; on Corsica, 117–20; on the education of women, 233n; on equality and inequality, 43, 46, 102, 108–10, 119, 121, 124, 238n, 256n; as exemplifying an “anti-European Eurocen-trism,” 56; on facts, 44; on the general will, 1–3, 17, 25, 56, 61, 90, 95–128, 132–33, 141, 142, 147, 150, 156, 159, 160, 199, 250n, 251n, 252n, 253n, 255n; Haitian Creole version of Rousseau’s “Le Devin du Village,” 240n; as legislator, 117; on the legislator, 98, 112–14, 122, 133; life of, 19–21, 26, 223n–225n, 230n, 234n; on military prowess, 33, 233n; on moral freedom, 49, 53, 57, 92; as a narrow individualist or social atomist, 123; pinning hopes on the periphery, 18, 54, 117; on the “right” of the strongest, 54, 90, 99, 100, 107, 110; on “savages,” 28, 32, 39–40, 42, 52–54, 228n, 236n, 239n; on the social contract, 43, 95, 97, 149, 227n; on sovereignty, 97, 99, 102, 106, 107, 114, 249n; will in general, 97, 127. See also general will, the
rule, 96, 98, 99, 117, 135, 136, 141, 225n, 247n; disciplinary rules, 89; of ethnology, 89; by force, 47, 99; law-like, 74; “of recognition,” 252; ruled, 97, 137, 146; rules, 88, 113, 124, 125, 167, 173, 179, 206, 219, 231n, 258n; rules of justice, 47; self-rule, 97, 114, 143; social rules, 5, 29–30, 46, 68, 79, 96, 140, 191, 196; when one cannot be treated as a, 75
Said, Edward, 242nSala-Molins, Louis, 223n, 229nSartre, Jean-Paul, 21, 67, 78, 81, 82, 93, 192,
222n, 226n, 246n, 250n“savage slot,” 14, 59, 86. See also Trouillot,
Michel-RolphSchapiro, Leonard, 121
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294 Index
Schmitt, Carl, 164, 188, 254n, 257nschool(s), 5, 20, 31, 68–69, 156, 247n; the Algiers
School, 85–86; neo-grammarian school of Leipzig, 171; “schooling,” 28, 37
Schwartz, Gary, 252nSchwartz, Joseph M., xii, 217Scott, John T., 60, 253nSegal, Daniel, 182Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 71Senghor, Léopold, 187September 11, 2001 (9/11), 204, 252nSeuren, Pieter A. M., 178Shame, 40, 45, 55, 246nShapiro, Ian, 198, 217–18Sheller, Mimi, 188Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 16, 200, 203, 265nShih, Shu-mei, 226n–227nShilliam, Robbie, 263nShklar, Judith N., 109, 254nShulman, George, 198Sil, Rudra, 220Skinner, Quentin, 15; Skinnerian approaches,
207Skocpol, Th eda, 194slavery, 23, 46, 90–91, 99, 102, 158, 181, 213, 218,
228n, 229n, 239n; antislavery organizations, 176, 214, 216
Smith, Rogers, xi, xiii, 217sociogeny, 245sociology, 11, 55, 58, 191, 219Song, Sarah, 165Spain, 2, 260South Africa(n), xiv, 20, 66, 168, 213Starobinski, Jean, 20, 38, 57, 224n, 226n, 230n,
253nSwenson, James, 56, 224nsymbol(s), 49, 145, 170, 183, 187, 244n; hollowed
symbolism, 49, 76, 110, 154, 158; symbolic form(s), 7, 10, 49, 136, 145, 164, 169–70, 200, 261n, 263n; symbolic life worlds, 11, 14, 16, 48, 55, 61, 77, 86, 124, 143, 166, 169, 172–78, 184, 196, 198, 217, 219, 265n; symbolic power, 183–84, 189, 226n, 228n; symbolic rejection, 65, 92
Takaki, Ronald, 182Talmon, J. L., 121–23Taylor, Charles, 165–66, 169, 214teacher(s), 28, 65, 68, 70, 72, 136, 226n, 244n,
261nteleological suspensions, 89, 200theodicy, 58, 70theology, 259nTh omas, Deborah A., 184Tobin, Gary, vii, xivTodorov, Tzvetan, 50, 116, 250n–251nToninato, Paola, 189torture, 244n; tortured, 56, 149; torturer, 67
Tosquelles, François, 87, 248ntransdisciplinarity, 6Tronto, Joan, 217Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, xiv, 14, 21, 22, 59, 86,
162, 163, 174, 175, 228n, 257n; on non-naïve optimism, 59
truth, 25, 27, 64, 88, 232n; access to, 230n; ac-counts of, 199; discrete, 215; embodiments of, 65, 226n; enacting, 215; entanglement(s) of, 80; at a glance, 41; historical, 44; Orwell on, 56; political, 80, 138; regimes of, 197; seeking, 35, 39, 151; speaking, 88; un-, 254n
Tully, James, 167–68, 217Tunisia, 37Turner, Victor, 176, 216
United States (USA), 5, 14, 20, 72, 101, 168, 176, 196, 228n, 248n, 255n
values, 7, 18, 24, 29, 56, 69, 76, 88, 196, 215, 231n, 244n, 254n, 256n; alternative, 35, 72; colonization as introducing, 90; as consistent across cultures, 215; as the core of “nations,” 156; that curb extreme inequali-ties, 124; inverted, 138–39; objectivity of, 88; as refl ected through work of culture, 196; in relation to aims of law, 231n
Vatin, Jean-Claude, 85victim(s), 88, 89, 181, 182, 216; victimization, 87Virgil, 109Viroli, Maurizio, 109Voltaire, 227n, 237n, 239n
war(s), 32, 47, 67, 196, 218; in Algeria, 129, 248n; citizens recalling themselves as a people in the midst of, 103; civil, 44, 250n; criminals, 158; as a lens for understanding the absence of a legitimate political domain, 110; relation of sophistication of warfare to moral virtue, 41; as shaping the character of theory, 227n; slavery/colonization as protracted state of, 90, 99; total, 143; World War II, 20, 123, 224
Weber, Max, 103, 113, 115, 264nWedeen, Lisa, 220, 237nWeil, Simone, 238nWhelan, Frederick G., 209, 227n, 228nwhite(s), 22, 67, 176, 182, 225n, 257nWinford, Donald, 262n–263nWiredu, Kwasi, 186, 215Wokler, Robert, 26–27, 59, 236n, 237n, 240n,
250n, 255nWolin, Sheldon, 163
xenophobia, 132, 181
Yack, Bernard, 133Young, Iris M., 15, 250n
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j u s t i d e a s
Roger Berkowitz, Th e Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal
Tradition
Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas,
Th e Truth of Democracy
Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfi lio, Symbolic Forms for a
New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfi gurations of Critical Th eory
Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400–1500
Michael J. Monahan, Th e Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the
Politics of Purity
Drucilla Cornell and Nyoko Muvangua (eds.), uBuntu and the Law:
African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence
Drucilla Cornell, Stu Woolman, Sam Fuller, Jason Brickhill, Michael
Bishop, and Diana Dunbar (eds.), Th e Dignity Jurisprudence of
the Constitutional Court of South Africa: Cases and Materials,
Volumes I & II
Nicholas Tampio, Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in
Contemporary Political Th eory
Carrol Clarkson, Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional
Justice
Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Th eory: Reading Rousseau Th rough
Fanon
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